Boycotts & deadlines

Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have spent much of the past week reconciling their earlier divergent views on contesting the January 8 elections. Dawn reported on Friday that their representatives in the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) and the All Pakistan Democratic Movement (APDM), respectively, reached an agreement on 13 of the 15 points on their charter of demands, to be put forth collectively to President Pervez Musharraf as conditions to contest the elections. The agreed points, reported The News, include end to emergency and restoration of the Constitution; elections on schedule (January 8); new interim set-up in consultation with the opposition parties; suspension of local bodies; full independence of the Election Commission and an end to ghost polling stations. The points of disagreement, said The Daily Times, are the reinstatement of the deposed judges before the elections and a deadline for their demands to be accepted.

This cooperation, argued The Friday Times, is beneficial to both Bhutto and Sharif: “If Sharif’s APDM (without Maulana Fazal ur Rehman) had boycotted the elections while the ARD took part, life would have moved on (as it did in the 1985 elections in which Sharif took part but which Bhutto boycotted) and Sharif, Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Imran Khan would have been consigned to oblivion for another five years. This would have hurt Sharif much more than the other two (who at best may be worth a dozen national seats between them) because the PMLN is bidding to reclaim its status as one of the two mainstream parties of the country at a time when the ruling PMLQ is flaky owing to the great unpopularity of its military benefactor. If the PMLN stays out of the next election, the PMLQ under Chaudhry Pervez Elahi will capitalise on its last eight years in power and strike deeper roots in state and society in the next five, diminishing the PMLN’s chances of regrouping and living to fight another day. For Bhutto’s ARD, too, this is a good move. It will add weight to her demands that conditions must be propitious for a free and fair campaign so that the best (wo)man wins. It also ensures that she may get the better of a level playing field in a three-way fight between the PPP, PMLN and PMLQ in which the anti-Bhutto vote bank may be split between the two PML factions.”

Ahsan’s Choice

Aitzaz Ahsan, as a leading PPP politician who has filed his nomination papers for a Lahore constituency, and as the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, could just have healed a rift between the lawyers and politicians. From his house arrest in Lahore, he wrote a letter to lawyers on December 4, saying that they should campaign for binding the candidates, if all major parties decide to contest the elections, to an oath that they would work for the cause of the judiciary if elected (Dawn, December 5).

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With this, said The Daily Times in an editorial on Friday, he could have broken a “dangerous trend”: “Since November 3 (when emergency was proclaimed), the rift of opinion has widened between the citizens, inspired by the lawyers’ movement, and the politicians. The political parties are increasingly being dubbed immoral and accused of being ‘secretly aligned with the government’ as the state swoops down on the lawyers and civil society representatives, subjecting them to the criminal clauses of the law and throwing them in jails. In a way, therefore, events on the ground seemed to be going in favour of the party in power. The political parties were being discredited for their pragmatism and their point of view was being given short shrift. The ‘pure’ idea of rejection does not sit well with those who are expected to operate the democratic system by coming to power.”

In The News (December 7), Rahimullah Yusufzai too welcomed this attempt to defuse the situation whereby “the civil society, led by the lawyers, has put so much moral pressure on the opposition political parties that most are finding it difficult to contest the elections”.

Browsing in Lahore

Lahore will soon get a book street off the Mall, reported The Daily Times on December 2.

mini.kapoor@expressindia.com