Such is the paucity of information coming out of Pakistan that it is difficult to say for sure whether the movement for restoration of democracy has in fact been called off. And if it has been called off, who took the decision, when, where and why. AP has quoted Malik Mohammad Qasim, acting secretary-general of MRD, as having told a press conference that MRD leaders had directed their supporters to stop courting arrests by shouting anti-government slogans in front of government offices. It does not say who authorized him to make this statement, which leaders he was referring to, and how they had consulted one another and communicated the decision to him and their supporters. A subsequent message by PTI quotes unidentified MRD headers as describing the current lull in the 19-week-old campaign as a “temporary phase” and expressing confidence that it would regain momentum. Clearly one cannot make any worthwhile assessment on the basis of such scrappy and contradictory reports.
Even so certain points can be made. The movement is now marking time even in Sind where alone it acquired mass support. A lot of time must elapse before the campaign can be revived in a meaningful sense of the term. That is the lesson of history in the sub-continent. Gandhiji spaced his movements by a decade or so. We witnessed the first major political upsurge in what is now Pakistan in 1968, the second in 1977 and the third in 1983. It has been a different story in Bangladesh since 1971. But on the face of it, Pakistan is very different from Bangladesh because the coercive apparatus of the state is better organised and more impervious to popular aspirations there. Thus regardless of whether the movement has been formally called off or not, General Zia-ul-Haq can congratulate himself on having won another round in the contest with forces of democracy; and his backers in Washington, Riyadh and elsewhere can sit back in the assurance that he will be there for quite some time to honour the commitments he has made to them in return for their generous assistance.
This is not a surprising development for a variety of reasons. General Zia’s fate hinged on whether the top military brass would stay loyal to him, or decide to dump him if only to buy a respite for itself. Once the movement came to be centred in Sind and there too mainly on the Sindhis (the Urdu-speaking people from India in Karachi and elsewhere more or less kept out of it), the General did not have much reason to worry about his military colleagues. As is well known, most of them come from Punjab and the adjoining areas of the NWFP. As such they were not under the kind of social and psychological pressure which could have obliged them to break with General Zia. It could have been a different matter if the movement had engulfed Punjab in the same way it engulfed Sind. But it did not. Indeed, even Baluch leaders, who are most aggrieved against the military which has violently and ruthlessly suppressed them in the past, decided to keep out of the movement. We can speculate on the factors and calculations which led them to act the way they have but that would not be particularly pertinent in the present context. Right now, we are only concerned with the fact that the Baluch non-participation weakened the movement and facilitated the task of the Pakistan government to crush it.
General Zia has interpreted the failure of the movement to secure his exit as an endorsement of his programme to establish his version of an Islamic order in Pakistan. Interestingly enough, his scheme has less to do with Islam, however one may interpret it, than with the so-called Turkish model, so-called because in Turkey the Generals do allow free elections and permit the majority party or coalition to form government which he has no intention to do. The constituents of his scheme are clear. The military rule is to be perpetuated under a deceptive veneer of Islamic laws. It is now certain that he will not allow elections to be fought on party lines if they are held at all even in 1985 which is by no means certain, and that all powers would rest in the presidency which he has every intention to occupy. There can be no question of decentralization of power and respect for the rights of linguistic-cultural minorities under such a set-up. This cannot but keep simmering the embers of Sindhi nationalism which we have witnessed recently and of Baluch and Pushtoon nationalisms we saw earlier. Thus the crisis in Pakistan has only been suppressed; it has not been resolved.