To be or not to be Prime Minister?

COINCIDENTAL to Benazir Bhutto’s ‘Chehlum’, a kind of debate has erupted as to who would be the PPP’s candidate for the office of prime minister in the next government. It was almost a settled issue in that the party high command in its caucus at Naudero soon after the burial of their slain leader, had decided that Makhdoom Amin Faheem would be the party nominee for heading the government.c The decision was unanimous, with full support of Asif Zardari whose appointment by Benazir Bhutto as the party chief for the “interim period” was also endorsed by the same caucus. But as with the passing of days the imperative of realpolitik caught up, an impression began to build that Asif Zardari does have the required competence to lead the party in the parliament as well. It was Senator Babar Awan who broke the silence and publicly said that Asif Zardari would be the PPP’s candidate for the office of prime minister. A few days later a US newsmagazine, Newsweek, quoted him having said in an interview that he is the party’s “best known face” and in case it was required he could assume the role of country’s chief executive. But the report was almost instantaneously denied, even by Zardari himself who told a group of visiting journalists he was not a candidate for the office of prime minister. His argument was that since he was not standing for election to parliament, there was no question of setting his heart on the prime ministerial slot. The release of Benazir Bhutto’s will for public view, Asif Zardari’s purported comment to the American weekly about his candidature for the prime ministerial post and its instantaneous clarification - the three developments that came in quick succession should greatly help in understanding the mind of the PPP as it goes to polls on February 18. In all probability, the will was made public to stifle the ongoing murmur in some rural quarters of the party in Sindh that Zardari, a non-Bhutto, had ‘imposed’ himself on the party. And his move to rename his son as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was being interpreted as an all-too obvious attempt at camouflaging his game plan to wrest the party from the Bhutto family. With the will now seen by the public wherein Benazir Bhutto has reposed full confidence in her spouse’s legitimacy and competence to inherit the party leadership, the PPP should have the unity that any party would like to put on show on the eve of general elections.
In turbulent times like the ones the PPP is presently undergoing, it is not very uncommon that political structures break up into many factions. It was nothing short of a political miracle that the party high command had succeeded in tiding over its first test that came in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Her control over the party was all pervasive and total with no clear heir apparent. But the party did not splinter up when it made sudden departure, the credit for which goes to the senior party leaders. Political parties are an inescapable reality in democracy, even when they flourish in corruption and ineptitude. The American founding fathers, contemptuous of the contemporary party-based European politics as they were, did not envisage any role for political parties in the constitution they wrote for their newly liberated country. But that was a misplaced premise, soon to crumble. Within less than 25 years, political parties emerged on the scene and in no time dominated the electoral process.
 

In the name of security

EVERY single day, 3,000 people in the world die and some 100,000 are injured, many of them seriously. They are not killed by disease. And more importantly, they are not killed by terrorism. They are killed in automobile wrecks. Measured against this horrific death toll, the murders by Al-Qaeda and its satraps in the seven years since 9/11, even including the savage terrorist butchery in Iraq, equates to just a few weeks’ worth of roadside carnage. Yet such is the prominence given to the US-led war on international terror that massive new surveillance nets have been created and draconian procedures set in place, for instance for international travelers, all in the name of security. But security for what? In the case of America and Britain, it is hardly security for the freedoms that they still seek to claim underpin their national ways of life. The UK is now one of the most security-monitored societies in the world. Kim Jong-il and his repressive regime in North Korea would give their eyeteeth to be able to afford the extensive network of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) installations that now watch ordinary Britons as they go about their daily lives. No other country boasts so many CCTV cameras. Had North Korea many international visitors, its border police would envy and admire the way that US immigration officials treat arrivals in their country, the constant suspicion, the frequent detentions of people whose names or profiles happen to match someone else on the wanted list of one federal agency or another. Innocent travelers to the US have been held and interrogated sometimes for weeks until released without a word of apology or explanation and certainly without compensation.
In the UK, as the revelation that an MP, Sadiq Khan, was bugged by the security service while talking in prison to a terror suspect, who was also a constituent and childhood friend, has demonstrated that even British legislators, who by custom have been immune from such surveillance are now fair game. More worryingly it seems that government ministers knew nothing about this snooping. In a democratic society, where power rests ultimately with elected representatives, it is not right that police and intelligence officers, for all the important work they do in combating terror threats, should be acting independently of political control. Yet this is a logical outcome of the terrorist hare that authorities around the world have set running. Just as PLO plane hijackings in the 1970s turned international air travel into an often-cumbersome ordeal, so the threat posed by a few thousand mindless bigots has encouraged the growth of increasingly intrusive and paranoid behavior by the forces of law and order. There is a balance to be struck and a strong argument that it has been missed, with the scales swinging alarmingly toward repression, in the name of countering a threat that is markedly less than motorists and pedestrians face every day.

—Arab News