Side-effect

By Harris Khalique

The senators belonging to different factions of Pakistan Muslim League staged a walk-out from the current session of the Senate protesting against the remarks made by an Awami National Party senator in one of the appearances he made on a television talk show. He perhaps mentioned that the leadership of the Muslim League included people who ate pork and consumed alcohol. I couldn’t watch the programme but supposedly morality of parliamentarians and Islamic values in the backdrop of Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of the republic were being discussed. It was alleged that the ANP senator made a reference to the eating habits of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, father of the nation and president of the All India Muslim League which later became the Pakistan Muslim League. The senator denied the allegation and said he did not mean to imply the Quaid-e-Azam and respected him fully. He asserted that his comments were being blown up disproportionately.

To the citizens of Pakistan, is it really of any consequence today what Mr Jinnah ate or drank when young? Or for that matter whether Allama Iqbal used to drink or not? What matters to us now is the governance and state of affairs in the country Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisioned and struggled for. None of the factions of the Muslim League have anything to do with the ideals, views and practices of Jinnah. Their claim to being the successor party or parties of Jinnah’s Muslim League and staging a walk-out on that pretext is totally unjustified. Jinnah’s Muslim League soon became Unionist League after partition. Following his (expedited) death, feudal lords of West Pakistan, in cahoots with the protégé of the Indian Civil Service we inherited, took over the country. Then we saw a long drawn martial rule of General Ayub Khan and the formation of the dictator’s party which was named Muslim League with a prefix. A lame opposition party in dictator’s parliament was also another Muslim League with a different prefix. Then there was a Muslim League formed by General Ziaul Haq. Some years later, another was formed under the instructions of General Pervez Musharraf. The various factions of Muslim League we have today, PML-Nawaz, PML-Quaid-e-Azam, PML-Ziaul Haq, Awami Muslim League, All Pakistan Muslim League (Musharraf’s new antic), to name a few, have nothing whatsoever to do with either Jinnah or his party. They are the direct successors or derivatives of different parties formed by feudal lords, retired bureaucrats, business magnates and autocrats. To use a cliché, Jinnah would be turning in his grave when referred to as the president of a party whose factions today perpetuate a politics that revolves around interests of the wealthy, repression of the poor and bigotry when it comes to matters of religion.

The tragedy is that the same has happened to other parties. They have gone on a complete tangent from what their initiators stood for. Today, the PPP struggles to harmonise the interests of feudal lords and ladies with those who believe in neo-liberal management of economy. Common populace and programmes for their uplift seem no more than penance. The firebrand National Awami Party of yesteryear, which linked its politics to global emancipation of the working classes and realisation of the rights of oppressed nationalities, is now reduced to a group of politicians calling themselves ANP who pursue narrow local interests and behave as the counterparts of Karzai on this side of the border. None of them are true successors of their erstwhile leadership.