Talking to a senior PPP figure, I got the sense that the old guard are aware that this is the last time the party is likely to come to power. A number of those in authority and their front men appear therefore determined to rake it in while they can.
If they were also providing the country with decent governance and decisive leadership, we could perhaps put up with ministers sticking their snouts into the public trough. But back in Pakistan on a brief visit, I find the same power shortages, a mounting insurgency and runaway inflation. In addition, we have the ongoing scandal of the sugar shortage.
All countries have problems of one sort or another, even though we seem to be blessed with more than our share. But elsewhere, there is usually an attempt to come to grips with them. Islamabad currently appears to be good only for issuing statements increasingly divorced from reality.
There is a lot of realism in the tacit admission that this is probably the PPP’s last stint in power. Quite apart from this government’s abysmal track record over the last 18 months or so, demographic forces have been quietly at work to marginalise Pakistan’s biggest and most popular party.
Even a cursory analysis of last year’s general elections will reveal that the PPP’s power base is now limited to rural Sindh and southern Punjab, also a largely rural area. It has been virtually eliminated as a political force in Pakistan’s major cities. With the PML-N dominating north and central Punjab, and the MQM calling the shots in Karachi and Hyderabad, the PPP is being squeezed in areas where it was at least competitive earlier.
This trend has been evident for some time now, but the PPP chose to do nothing to arrest it. Increasingly, the rising Pakistani middle class looks to more than the traditional PPP promise of roti, kapra aur makan. They want good governance, education, security and employment. And unfortunately for the PPP, they think that the PML-N is the party that can deliver on these key issues.
Despite his many limitations, Asif Zardari has tried to fill the huge void left in the PPP after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. And to be fair to him, he has managed to keep the ship of state afloat by attempting to bring Nawaz Sharif on board, and forging some kind of consensus in the fight against terrorism. But at the end of the day, leadership is about more than backroom deals.
By withdrawing to the presidency and surrounding himself with cronies, Zardari is doing himself no favours. Another problem is the abundance of black hair dye on display in cabinet meetings. This underlines the absence of younger members at the upper levels of the party hierarchy. While experience is all very well, the PPP could certainly do with some energy, dynamism and fresh ideas. Above all, it could do with some idealism.
And although Bilawal Zardari Bhutto is being groomed for a future role as party leader, I’m afraid he does not appear to be cut out for the job. I saw him in London last year when he addressed a press conference soon after his mother’s murder. While he came across as a sensible and articulate young man, I thought then that he lacked the fire in the belly that set his mother and grandfather apart.
Never having lived in Pakistan for any length of time as an adult, and speaking little Urdu, I do not see him capturing the hearts of the PPP jiyalas as his mother and grandfather did.
Even more serious is the security threat he would be under were he to campaign in future elections. The reality is that the Bhuttos have many enemies in Pakistan, and not just from among the Taliban. Minus the Bhutto charisma and given the changing map of Pakistani politics, I do not see how the PPP can avoid the fate of being in permanent opposition.
If one adds the failure of leadership it is currently displaying to this depressing mix, I can visualise the PPP breaking up once the glue of power evaporates after the next election. Again, it was Benazir Bhutto’s personality that held the party together. The downside to her grip on the party was her unwillingness to encourage a strong second tier to emerge that could take over if the need arose.
For me, this analysis is tinged with considerable sadness. Ever since it came into being over four decades ago, I have supported the PPP. While I have been critical of many of its policies and politicians, I have broadly approved of what it stood for, even though it seldom delivered on its promises. Nevertheless, by at least addressing the concerns of the poor and the oppressed, it positioned itself as a champion of women, the minorities and the marginalised.
Even now, I find myself hoping that somehow it will drag itself up as it has done in the past. Alas, I just do not see the kind of leadership needed for this miracle to come to pass. The truth is that given his close proximity to religious extremism, I cannot support Nawaz Sharif and his faction of the Muslim League. I have always opposed the politics of ethnicity, so that rules out the MQM, despite its secular moorings. Obviously, I could never support army rule or a theocracy.
I suspect this is the dilemma many thinking Pakistanis face today. Many have stood behind the PPP over the years, but now find themselves frustrated and isolated. While I fervently hope this government will complete its term of office, I fear that deprived of the claim that it was not allowed to govern for five years, it will have its last electoral card trumped.
Finally, I do wish Zardari would stir out of his presidential bunker once in a while to express his sympathy for the victims of terrorism. It might pose a security risk, but as the old saying goes, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Last night I saw the first in a new BBC series of nature programmes called Life. Narrated by David Attenborough, the TV show was a dazzling example of photography and painstaking research. We were treated to the sight of a dozen killer whales hunting seals in the Arctic; a mother octopus who starves to death while tending her eggs; and sundry other animals, birds and fish exhibiting the most extraordinary behaviour in their struggle to survive.
This endless struggle to survive and procreate was also the subject of a recent series about Charles Darwin. Written and presented by Richard Dawkins, the biologist and campaigner for Darwin’s theory of evolution, it was a brilliant exposition of our emergence from the primeval slime millions of years ago.
And finally, I watched hypnotised as a programme on the Hubble telescope filled our TV screen with stunning images of distant stars, nebulae and galaxies. Captured by the orbiting telescope, objects whose light has been travelling for thousands of years appeared in dazzling colours and forms.
All three TV programmes served as reminders of man’s insignificance when measured on the universal scale of time and distance. Although the universe was created around 14 billion years ago, it is still expanding. Life emerged hundreds of millions ago on our planet, and is still evolving.
Cern, the European nuclear research centre on the border of France and Switzerland, is currently trying to recreate the conditions that followed within milliseconds of the Big Bang that created the universe. Here, the Large Hadron Collider is man’s most ambitious to investigate the very origins of the physical universe, as well as other mysteries of quantum physics.
Given the cutting edge nature of the research at Cern, it was disconcerting to learn that a scientist had been arrested on the charges of corresponding with AQIM, the North African arm of Al Qaeda. Of Algerian origin, Adlene Hicheur was corresponding with the terrorist group by email, and apparently had been trying to identify possible targets.
Even though his research did not equip him to cause any serious damage, Hicheur, if found guilty, is clearly on the same ideological wavelength as Osama bin Laden. Somehow, I have naively assumed that scientists are above the siren call of religious extremism. After all, how can you explore the earliest moments of the creation of the universe, and simultaneously accept the literalist interpretation of the event given by many religious texts, and blindly accepted by extremists?
Pervez Hoodbhoy, in his eminently lucid book Muslims and Science, gave examples of Pakistani nuclear scientists who engaged in research into the supernatural. In a conference on miracles in Islam organised in Islamabad under Zia, one of our scientists presented a paper on the possibility of tapping the energy of djinns to meet our power requirements. Another worked out how to calculate the degree of hypocrisy in society.
Now I do not question anybody’s right to follow his own line of research, no matter how eccentric. However, if scientists are conducting research at institutions funded by taxpayers, we do have the right to expect some more meaningful output. And when retired nuclear scientists are found to be close to Al Qaeda, as at least two from our scientific establishment were after 9/11, eyebrows will be raised around the world.
As we have learned to our cost, many doors have been shut to Muslims after 9/11. Visas, never easy to obtain before that world-changing event, are harder to come by than ever before. Log on to visa requirements for most Western (and many Muslim) states, and you will see that applicants from over two dozen Muslim countries now have their applications processed through sundry databases in the countries they wish to visit. All this causes endless delays.
Many Western universities no longer admit Muslim students to nuclear or biological research centres. They have seen post-graduate students from their departments returning home and getting involved in weapons research and development. And after A.Q. Khan’s alleged theft of plans for uranium enrichment equipment from his Dutch laboratory, how many Muslim scientists would get jobs at similar nuclear establishments?
Understandably, many Muslims who do not subscribe to extremist philosophy feel bitter at being rejected because of the actions of a handful. But after Hicheur’s arrest, how can you blame Westerners for being suspicious? After all, he was a French national who had studied at some of the finest institutions in Britain and the United States. So if he could go over to Al Qaeda and seriously contemplate terrorist attacks, what’s to stop other Muslims from following the same path?
The danger is that through the misguided actions of Hicheur and a few scientists like him, the Muslim world will find itself cut off from the mainstream of scientific research. Already, we are trailing far behind the rest of the world in the sciences, as we are in so much else. For decades, virtually no original research has been conducted in Muslim nations. And when we miraculously produce a Nobel-prize winner like Dr Abdus Salam, we drive him away by our bigotry.
Our excuse for our backwardness in the sciences is the poverty that is endemic in so many Muslim countries. But this is not true for several oil-rich states. The reality is that there is not a single world-class research institution in any Islamic country. Instead of squabbling over the fine points of dogma, if we could devote some of our energy to acquiring knowledge, we would all be far better off today.
I have no doubt that Hichuer is a hero to many Muslims who remain mired in a permanent sense of paranoia and past grievances, real and imagined. When I mentioned A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation activities in a recent article, I was attacked by several readers for not appreciating his efforts to make Pakistan a nuclear power. And now, as the Kerry-Lugar Bill continues to be criticised, in part because it seeks to curb future proliferation, I am sure many Pakistanis will fulminate against the injustice of the American legislation. But the harsh reality is that life is unfair; and as Darwin has outlined in his theory of evolution, only the fittest survive and prosper.
