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| Afghanistan/South Asia | |
| Fate of Sindh | |
| 2004-06-11 | |
| A look at why Karachi has become the war zone it is and an epicenter of global terrorism. Not suprisingly it involves lots of Generals, doing everything they can to keep Benazir Bhuttoâs PPP out of power, not matter how much it screws the country up. A brief history of the politics of Sindh province sheds light on who is responsible for its plight and why. It also suggests an improbable way out of the quagmire. Before Gen Ziaul Haq usurped power, Sindh was generally free of religious, ethnic or foreign-inspired terrorist strife. Then Gen Zia hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and created the MQM to counter the PPP in Sindh so that he could divide and rule. In 1983, the MQM rescued him from the Movement to Restore Democracy by stopping Karachi and Hyderabad from lining up behind the rural protest. This fertilised the seeds of ethnic conflict between Sindhis and Mohajirs and nurtured the urban-rural divide. Generals Aslam Beg and Hamid Gul followed the same strategy after 1988. In pursuit of personal ambitions, they nudged the MQM to stab the PPP government in the back during the 1989 Midnight Jackals no-confidence operation. When that failed, the MQM went on the warpath against the PPP, tearing asunder Karachi and Hyderabad, and paved the way for Ms Bhuttoâs sacking in 1990. Gen Beg took money from Habib Bank and Mehran Bank to rig the 1990 elections and keep the PPP out of power in Sindh and Islamabad. He fished Jam Sadiq Ali out of exile and helped him cobble a government in Sindh with the MQM. But in just two years the Jam Sadiq-Altaf Hussain alliance plunged Karachi and rural Sindh into violent anarchy. After Ms Bhutto returned to power in 1993, she was faced with a resurgence of MQM inspired terrorism and re-launched the clean-up operation with the help of the politically neutral army chief, Gen Abdul Waheed. Later, Gen Naseerullah Babar used the Rangers and police to much the same effect. By the time she left, Sindh was at peace again. Incidently, the police officers who were responsible for cleaning up Karachi are currently being hunted down by MQM hitmen, since the latter is now back in favor and can take dire revenge™. However, a destabilising new element was again injected into the Sindh equation by General Pervez Musharraf. Having determined to keep the PPP out, and distrusting the MQM, he wittingly opened up political space for the MMA to capture Karachi after a boycott by the MQM. But by the time the general elections had rolled up, the MQM and General Musharraf had clinched a mutually opportunistic deal. In exchange for supporting the government in Islamabad, the same MQM against whom three army chiefs before General Musharraf had railed was handed over the governorship of Sindh and made a critical partner in the Sindh government. But this has provoked acute tensions between the MQM and MMA in urban Karachi and between the MQM and PPP in rural Sindh. The situation is untenable because the PPP is the largest party in Sindh and the MMA is the ruling party in Karachi but both are out of the provincial and administrative loop of rural Sindh and urban Karachi respectively. So chaos and bloodshed will continue General Musharraf has tied himself up in knots. Now he cannot antagonise the MQM in Sindh because that would spell the end of his government in Islamabad. So he has sacked the non-MQM chief minister and is hoping another one will âmanageâ the situation better. At the same time he is hoping to consolidate his alliance with the MQM when the local elections roll around next year. But a victory of the MQM in Karachi will be at the cost of the MMA, in particular the Jamaat-e Islami, which is bound to fiercely resist relinquishing power, as demonstrated by the violence in the recent by-elections in Karachi. Therefore, General Musharraf may eventually have to nominate a military governor to try and undo the disastrous effects of his political handiwork. But that will only bring him full circle to the beginning. This is what happens when a fractured polity, as in Sindh, is exacerbated by the politics of exclusion at the altar of personal ambition instead of being nudged into peaceful competition by the politics of inclusion at the altar of the national interest. Conclusion: Gen Zia ul Haq and Gen Aslam Beg screwed up Sindh and Karachi for personal political reasons by excluding the PPP from its rightful stake in the province. But Generals Asif Nawaz, Abdul Waheed and Jehangir Karamat tried to undo their predecessorsâ disastrous legacies because they were politically neutral and had no personal political ambitions. Gen Musharrafâs position is untenable: he is compelled by circumstances to keep the PML-N at arms length but his hostility towards the PPP defies political explanation. For a host of domestic and international reasons, the PPP is ideally placed to be his natural political ally. Yet a personal pique against Ms Bhutto has rendered General Musharrafâs political somersaults ineffective in the national interest. The PPP and the MQM will have to learn to share power in Sindh effectively, and General Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto will have to work together in Islamabad before Karachi can be reprieved and Pakistan can breathe freely again. Since that is unfortunately not yet on the cards, both the city and the country will continue to suffer the adverse consequences of a well-meaning but hopelessly misguided man on horseback.
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| Posted by:Paul Moloney |