Yes-man democracy

Why all the fuss about dragging Ayub Khan out of his grave just to get at Omar Ayub Khan? The man has every right to fight the establishment to reclaim the “people’s stolen mandate”, doesn’t he, even if his grandfather did set the precedent of snatching that mandate – and keep it snatched – when the country was still crawling out of the wreckage of partition.

Yet watching him talk to the press outside Adiala jail a few days ago, especially how he waved his fists and said “wazir-e-azam Imran Khan” every few seconds, reminded me of the time when I managed to squeeze a media pass to parliament as a foreign correspondent back when General Musharraf was building a new Pakistan.

And there was Omar Ayub, thundering on the floor about how the people’s mandate was best protected by calling out all the traitors who wanted the president to remove his uniform. The only difference was Musharraf’s name instead of Imran’s as Pakistan’s best hope and only saviour; and the grey hair.

Those days our reporter friends used to chase stories about who else wanted the general to stay a soldier – “it is like my second skin”, he famously said – and cheesy one-liners from politicians that love to stay relevant were regularly flashed as Breaking News.

Like that nugget from Altaf Hussain. “Why do you want him to take it off, what do you want to see”?

Not much later he joined PML-N to serve the people and save democracy, the same lot he now accuses so passionately of being blessed with that “stolen mandate”, but guess which leader suddenly became the country’s number-one at that time?

There’s also the fact that if Ayub Khan hadn’t “stolen the people’s mandate” and stayed in power for so long neither Omar nor his father would have been left with the clout and money to rub shoulders with the Sharifs, enjoy high profile ministries in PML-N, join the merry band that formed PML-Q and enjoyed the same privileges under a military dictatorship, and now for the grandson to dedicate his career to getting Riyasat-e-Madina back.

Makes you wonder about his motives, doesn’t it, but Imran Khan didn’t think so when he picked him for his PM candidate and later named him opposition leader.

But he’s not the only one of his kind that has come back to save Pakistan.

Pervez Elahi, who just got out of jail after 11 months to a torrential social media welcome for “staying loyal to Imran Khan”, was of course Musharraf’s pick for Punjab’s CM, and also tore into anybody even hinting that a president in uniform wasn’t exactly good optics for a democratic setup; and a whole lot more.

Even much later, he made no qualms about leaning towards whichever party made him CM, and shook hands with the Zardari group only to drive to Imran’s office, use it as leverage, and become his CM. Then it didn’t take very long for “Punjab’s biggest daku” to become a “mujahid” (actual tweet, though more about Moonis Elahi) of democracy.

Let’s not forget that during this time a certain Sheikh Rashid also lavished Imran with the same crude praise that was once reserved for Nawaz Sharif and then Pervez Musharraf; and bagged a good couple of ministries for his troubles, this time managing to add the interior ministry to his resume as well. (Democracy at work?)

The less said about other parties and their loyalists, the better. My generation – born in the late 70s – learned to hate them as early as the 90s because they didn’t just “loot and plunder” as we eye-witnessed, they also left us with one of the most unfair and cruel social structures among emerging democracies.

But it wasn’t just the Sharifs and Zardaris that ate off the fat of the land, it was also all the yes-men littered around them that carved their own niche in that time as “electables”. And it surprises me that the generation that came after me venerates some of them as saviours of their mandate when the only thing that qualifies them as mujahideen of democracy is a strong yes-sir to anything and everything that comes out of Imran Khan; even when he turns right one minute and left the very next, both equally hard.

How genuine, then, is our democracy when the cleanest, most transparent elections would deliver us some of the same opportunistic characters from the last circus, and the one before that, when they helped bring the same “crooks” to power that they are so determined to crusade against now?

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024