The Reluctant Replacement
He's just an emerging adult, a college boy, after all. Unschooled in political intrigue, eager to continue his studies, unwilling, despite his anguish at his mother's untimely death, to leave the familiar world he has long inhabited, to enter the hostile one of competing alliances in a deadly atmosphere of violent dissent.As his mother believed herself to be responding to the clarion call of history in the making, and crowned herself head for life of the natural governing party of Pakistan, she named her son "one without equal", to match her determination.
He does not appear to have been groomed to take up her fallen torch. Educated abroad with his first tongue English, and life in Pakistan completely foreign to him, how could he be envisaged as the crown prince? Yet, she so designated him in her last will and testament, a dreadful burden for a beloved son.
This is a very strange kind of democracy, to be certain. Nominally so; the word has such a powerful echo of balance and civility to it. It sounds better, resounds better, promises more than that ugly word: dictatorship.
Yet under Benazir Bhutto's two rules the hardship of the majority of the population of Pakistan saw no respite. The poor and the destitute and the hopeless were still in those same pathetic throes of bare subsistence. Fanatical Islam dug its toes deeply into the soil of Pakistan during her reign and did so in the comfort of knowing there would be no protest, no attempts at dislodging them.
It was under her father's rule that Pakistan emerged triumphantly as a nuclear aspirant. He promised Pakistan freedom from hunger and want and gave it instead pride in nuclear achievement. Later, his daughter lamented her own role in guiding her country toward a missile defence system, while steadfastly ignoring her own pledges to the poor.
It was under the rule of a military dictatorship, of a rather benign variety - still the encourager of theological fanatacism - that the population realized some relief, with the introduction of a free press and an improvement in the status of women. These were accomplishments of a military man, General Musharraf, who had unseated her when Benazir Bhutto was accused of graft and corruption.
With re-born dedication to her country's future she re-affirmed her intention to once again take up the mantle thrown to her by destiny - and the country's worship of a family dynasty.
She felt she now understood the horribly deleterious manner in which she had encouraged terror militias, had forfeited her party's pledge to the poor. Now, determined to expunge extremism from the country's social, political and military, she became its victim.
She was not lacking in courage, but this is a personal decision made by individuals exercising their options for free choice. Why impose that dread future on her son? There was, after all, another option in the person of the party's vice-chairman who had stalwartly and faithfully led the party for years in her absence, Makhdoom Amin Fahim. A royal ascension is not commensurate with democratic action.
Forget the fiction of democracy; it appears to be a poor fit for a country that demonstrates its grief at the loss of a monumental figure as self-designated savior of the country. One that illustrates its readiness for civil adherence to law and justice by country-wide riots causing tens of millions of dollars of damage to cars, trains, banks, hospitals and factories; the very civic infrastructure a country relies upon to serve its people.
If the fictions don't materialize, then fall back on the tried and true, symbols and political structures designed to bring meaning and resolute determinism back to the country. The alternative is frightful; a surging fanatical element determined to haul the country back to medievalism, with the spectre of nuclear power unleashed.
An unholy combination of tribalism armed with the ultimate weapon of enablement and destruction.
Labels: Political Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 01, 2008
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