Daily Times editorial April 23, 2011

Dictators and politicians

Makhdoom Javed Hashmi is one of the few Seraiki area prominent leaders in the PML-N. Not only that, what sets him apart from the Sharifs is his resistance to General Musharraf’s rule, for which he served a four-year prison sentence. Since the Sharifs returned to Pakistan, this brave member of the PML-N found himself sidelined. His bitterness therefore is understandable. So is his outburst the other day from the floor of the National Assembly against his party’s leadership, dictators, and the politicians who collaborated with them in our history. These latter were asked by Hashmi, who led the way in this regard, to apologise for collaboration with such usurpers. His party’s members present in the house were less than pleased, but Hashmi’s admiring remarks about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto delighted the treasury benches.
Bitterness against his own party’s leadership aside, the mea culpa and demand that Hashmi has put forward has touched a raw nerve. It is an undeniable truth that almost all of the top leaders of the existing political class have been guilty of collaboration to a greater or lesser degree with military dictators in our history. Hashmi conceded that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death wiped out all his mistakes, including the sin of starting his political career under the patronage of Pakistan’s first military dictator, Ayub Khan. A pattern or political culture can be discerned if one runs down the list and flow of time to examine the track record of most of our political heavyweight worthies. Some collaborated with powerful military dictators out of what they considered tactical necessity (and their opponents dubbed sheer political opportunism), others embraced dictatorships out of motives of revenge against their opponents whom they could not otherwise match, or even lure of power, pelf and lucre. Whatever the range of motivations and justifications presented by the authors of such collaboration, nothing can excuse these political crimes.
Perhaps Hashmi’s unexpected and surprising diatribe can help focus minds on the phenomenon of collaboration with military usurpers and dictators by politicians in our history. We may not be able to change that history, but revisiting it with a critical outlook can at least provide an opportunity not only to examine the phenomenon, but learn also about the damage collaboration by the political class did to the country, while at the same time rewarding them with far more than thirty pieces of silver for their betrayal of all principle. We cannot within the realm of possibility envisage a wholesale purge of the political class of such collaborators (they are too many and too powerfully entrenched), but at the very least we should take a leaf from Hashmi’s book and educate and mobilise public opinion against a continuation or repetition of such betrayals of democratic principles by any member of the political class.
The Sharifs and the PML-N are in no mood to oblige the Makhdoom with his demand for an apology to the country for all past collaboration with dictators. But at the very least the cast of usual suspects who are guilty, and who range across the whole political spectrum, should be shamed about their past ‘sins’ and a climate evolved that would ensure the automatic ostracisation and condemnation of any member of the political class who indulges in such opportunism ever again. After all, if the compliant judiciary of the past has given way to the present (restored) judiciary that has sworn never again to legitimise a military coup maker, why can the political class not shed its opportunist feathers and emerge reborn as a segment genuinely wedded to the service of the people, a task in which there is no room whatsoever for serving as the handmaiden of any coup maker, usurper, or dictator of any hue, variety, shape or size.