Benazir Bhutto

The Supreme Court is getting ready to hear a number of petitions against the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) and has named a bench of judges along with known jurists as amici curiae to match the “seriousness” which the NRO has assumed in the public eye. As the court announced that it would start hearing the case after 21 days, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has clarified that till the pronouncement on corruption cases involved is made, no benefits will accrue to the affected parties.

The reactions to the new development have been interesting. President General Pervez Musharraf has repeated his “request” to Ms Benazir Bhutto to postpone her return to Pakistan to avoid “turmoil” – his chosen word to express a complex problem. He says he has not received Ms Bhutto’s reaction to his request, but the PPP spokespersons have already rejected the request, and preparations are on to welcome her in Karachi amid massive security measures after Al Qaeda, as conveyed through its deputy Baitullah Mehsud, threatened to kill her.

The “turmoil” the president wants to avoid is politically complex. It is not so much Al Qaeda he is currently dreading because that is a longer-term problem; nor can he be expected to ruminate too much on the personal safety of Ms Bhutto. It is the “turmoil” that is brewing inside the party he has been propping up and canvassing for quite blatantly over the past months, the PMLQ and its anti-PPP partners in power. While the attorney general, Malik Muhammad Qayyum, says the NRO will be implemented because it has not been “stayed” by the Supreme Court, the PMLQ leaders most upset by the prospect of facing a PPP led personally by Ms Bhutto consider the NRO as already defunct.

The old hackles are rising and the country is once again getting ready to settle into its crippling polarities. As passions begin to run on familiar lines, a report says that the tomb of the founder of the PPP, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at Naodero in Sindh, carries abusive graffiti against him. The Sindh chief minister has been most aggressive in his dislike of the “reconciliation” the president is bent upon effecting with Ms Bhutto. He sees a new political combination coalescing between the PPP and the MQM and finds himself once again consigned to the limbo of Tharparkar with acts of omission and commission during his tenure returning to haunt him.

Reflexes in the PMLQ have also sharpened after realising that, despite all kinds of passionate condemnation in the media, the PPP is bound to retain its hold over 30 percent of the electorate, which can manifest itself in all sorts of ways in the January 2008 general elections. So the PMLQ leaders are basking in the media-unleashed furore that the NRO has “let the corrupt run away with public money”. They want to scuttle the efforts being made by a besieged President Musharraf to widen his political support-base as he fights his lonely battle against Al Qaeda in the Tribal Areas.

Media anchors have typically glossed over the origin of the corruption cases in Pakistan and have carried along the “moral outrage” expressed by those supporting the Lal Masjid revolt and the lawyers’ movement, as they once again go into paroxysms over the NRO. The hype has been so intense that public opinion is now totally geared to the tribal trait of “honour” rather than the democratic condition of “compromise”. There is no regard paid to the need of safeguarding the country’s bipartisan system. A “rejectionism” which will ultimately go in favour of the extremist elements informs the thinking encouraged by the media in Pakistan. “Deal” is a swear word presented as such in the publicity “inserts” of one dominant TV news channel.

The love of confrontation and conflict is on the upswing in Pakistan. Apparently, the only way our “honour” can be saved is by refusing to agree to political compromise and reconciliation. Everyone wants martyrdom without any solution based on the democratic acceptance of “imperfections”; no one thinks of the meagre resource of talent and wisdom in the country’s political system. The tired myth of the “unerring wisdom of the 160 million people” is being repeated by all and sundry on TV channels, without admitting that the 160 million have repeatedly elected the same corrupt politicians again and again, giving the lie to the claim made in their favour.