Frightening Options
There can be no doubt that the elections in Pakistan were rigged from top to bottom. The very success of the opposition's call for a boycott of the provincial elections is an indication of this fact. Once again, Pakistan has been gripped by strikes, mass demonstrations, and repression. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the victims were Bhutto and his supporters in the Pakistan People's party (PPP). Today the gun is in the other hand, Bhutto and his provincial satraps massacring oppositionists. In Pakistan, as in India, the opposition is basically a rightist one. It hastily patched together a united front, known as the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), which drew massive crowds to its meetings by campaigning against rising prices and the lack of "Islamic laws" and for civil liberties. Fundamentally its support was due to general disenchantment and disillusionment with Bhutto's political record: a steady diet of repression, rising prices, monopoly of the mass media, and one gimmick after another instead of real measures to meet the needs of the masses. The opposition, of course, is qualitatively no better, though sections of it are clearly worse. A central component of the PNA is the semifascist obscurantist Jamaat-i-Islami (the Muslim equivalent of the Jan Sangh in India), and it is this organization which has provided the central ideological motif of the PNA campaign. The figure who symbolizes the opposition by S. Bhagat and Javad Hussein is a former air marshall, Asghar Khan, who was welcomed at the Karachi airport by 700,000 people during the campaign itself. Virtually bereft of ideas but considered incorruptible by the masses (which is not an irrelevant factor in a country in which corruption is institutionalized on all levels), Asghar Khan is a bad speaker, an even worse politician, and is no match for the agile Bhutto. But Bhutto is in power and represents the forces of "law and order, " while Asghar Khan leads the mass movement against him. At the moment, Bhutto is on the defensive. He has offered new provincial elections and re-elections in some of the National Assembly constituencies, but the opposition is demanding that Bhutto resign and that the army supervise fresh elections. This blatant call to the army to act as arbiter between warring political factions is laden with great dangers. It provides the army with new prestige, seriously tarnished after the Bangladesh debacle, and offers it a certain legitimacy. Given the fact that one of the PNA leaders is ex-General Niazi, who surrendered Dacca to the Indian army and has been explaining that it was Bhutto and the politicians who were responsible for the defeat and not the army, a more sinister undercurrent is clearly detectable. In reality, the Jamaat-i-Islami has a fair amount of support within the army. The officer caste, which used to be domin-
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SOUTH ASIA ated by the offspring of the landed gentry, is now populated by petty-bourgeois layers from the cities. This fact, coupled with Asghar Khan's army origins, means that Bhutto will have to make some concessions in order to survive. Continvous repression of the right would lead to an army intervention in the not too distant future. Such an intervention, if it occurred, would be on the Thai model, because of the altered composition of the officer caste. From his own standpoint, Bhutto's major tactical and political error was his contemptuous refusal to tolerate the existence of governments in the two border provinces of NWFP (North West Frontier Province) and Baluchistan which were made up of members of the National Awami party (NAP). The political program of this party was quite similar to Bhutto's except it tended to be secular in outlook, not utilizing Islam for narrow political purposes, a fact which made it marginally more forward looking than Bhutto's PPP. Both NAP governments were arbitrarily dismissed. In Baluchistan a guerrilla war ensured, which was contained, but not without significant casualties. A fake conspiracy/ treason charge was later fabricated against the NAP leaders, who now reside in Hyderabad Jail awaiting trial. The opposition decided to boycott the elections in Baluchistan unless the army was withdrawn to barracks. In the NWFP the National Democratic party (NDP), the continuation of the NAP, which had been banned, won the largest number of seats, and the wife of the detained NAP leader Wali Khan romped home with a large majority. From Bhutto's vantage point an alliance with the NAP would have defeated the right opposition, but his desire to rule alone paved the way to his present difficulties. Bhutto's predicament is thus of his own making. The creation by the PPP of the Federal Security Forces (FSF) as a special unit under its own control assigned to carry out repression against the PPP's political opponents has created a great deal of resentment in the more traditional police and army units. In a number of cities senior police officials were accused of being "too soft" on opposition strikers and demonstrators during the recent wave of riots. The army is also hostile to the FF, and Bhutto is now so uneasy about the mood in the army that he is prepared to make serious concessions to calm the situation. In fact, it has been reported that Bhutto had authorized the electoral defeat of Sheikh Rashid and Akhtar Malik, two senior PPP leaders, but these orders were not conveyed to the civil servants supervising the elections. In other areas civil servants openly stated that if they had allowed PPP candidates to lose they could have lost their jobs. The close link between the PPP and the state apparatus will further weaken the PPP in the medium term, since it creates the illusion that the party has mass support. The picture on the left is still bleak. Unlike India, Pakistan never had a mass Communist party. The Peking-Moscow split merely splintered the few groups that did exist. Bhutto succeeded in incorporating the radicalization of 1968-70 groups, but their influence is localized. The immediate future thus does not inspire much optimism.
Sri