PPP cochairman’s Kashmir talk is too loose to please India, writes Riyaz Masroor
Asif Ali Zardari is said to have wooed the charming Benazir, when he met her in London, with crates of mangoes from Fortnum & Mason, and marrons glacés. He knew the aristocratic Bhuttos would frown over his proposal because despite their vast estates in Sindh’s Nawabshah district Zardaris were seen as upstarts against the aristocratic Bhuttos.
Both married in 1987 and those crates of mangoes fetched $1.5 billion to Zardari as part of commission he would charge to contractors and business houses. He came to be known as Mr 10 percent and the sobriquet has indelibly stuck.
Both the famed diamond necklace in Switzerland and the Rockwood mansion outside London, according to a British newspaper, were linked to Zardari’s girlfriends. This and much more came his way by ‘investing’ few crates of mangoes; he knew he was betting on a long running horse.
Now that the ‘winning horse’ is dead and the death has propelled Zardari to the center stage, he is back with his ‘crate of mangoes’, this time offering them to India ; unabashedly in the blood-soaked package of Kashmir issue.
His reckless assertion that the Kashmir issue be shelved for posterity can draw weird comparisons, notwithstanding the clarification from his spokesman Farhatullah Babar.
It appears like a jolly child wanting a pretty bride to wait till he came of age and marry her. Or, it sounds like the prodigal husband of a princess, planning how he would spend the dowry, not knowing that the fief he thinks belonged to him was long forfeited. There are other quipping reactions saying that Zardari actually employed his idiotic streak to convey that his son Bilawal is the King-in-Waiting hence the idea of leaving the resolution of Kashmir issue upon the ‘energetic’ shoulders of the ‘new generation’.
Kashmiri politicians on either side of the political divide reacted to Zardari’s remark but with varied degree of caution and anger. While the National Conference patron Dr Farooq Abdullah hailed the ‘new concept’ the Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad promptly welcomed it. Separatists especially Syed Ali Geelani, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir A Shah and others termed it an insult to the sacrifices of Kashmiris as well as many Pakistanis who according to Geelani are still fighting to liberate Kashmir from the Indian occupation.
Mufti Muhammad Syed, patron of the ruling ally Peoples Democratic Party, displayed his trademark shrewdness when he, without even obliquely referring to Zardari’s statement, emphasized the need to resolve Kahsmir. However his ‘tamed’ rebel in PDP and Azad’s deputy, Muzaffar Hussain Baig had no qualms in endorsing the statement.
Founder of the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Toibah (The pious army), Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed accused Zardari of pleasing India and US.
But Sayeed’s reading seems blurred because Zardari need not rake up Kashmir to please Americans who brokered his electoral win.
If Zardari aspires to become Pakistani answer to Sonia Gandhi and call shots from behind, he is miscalculating his ‘mangoes’. He may share some parallels with Sonia; both have inherited the political fortunes of their spouses and both see their son as the future PM. But, while Sonia despite being an outsider managed to earn a place for herself in her party and may be also among people due to her refusal to becoming the Prime Minister, Benazir’s admirers and adversaries equally detest Zardari for corruption and sleaze.
Interestingly the Pakistan Peoples Party despite its proximity with India and US did not peddle Kashmir card during the poll campaign. Commonsense dictates that if PPP earned a mandate against Musharraf and ‘in favor of democracy’ it sounds morally incorrect to juggle Kashmir rather than the ‘restoration of democracy’.
Whatever principles the PPP professed post Zulfikar’s execution, it cannot so easily rub off the impression it has earned by the radical and hawkish stand over Kashmir. People are yet to forget Zulfikar’s passionate calls for a “1000-year Jihad against India”; his daughter Benazir would quite often reiterate this when in power. The Kashmiri anguish, therefore, is all the more understandable. More particularly because Kashmiris had been intensely emotional about the senior Bhutto as they saw in him the savior after he commissioned Pakistan’s nuclear program and threw up a rhetorical coinage of “Islamic Bomb”.
It was because of this perception that Bhutto’s execution in late seventies triggered a violent wave in Kashmir against General Zia and his supporters. Curiously, when Zia died in a mysterious air crash in 1988, Kashmir shut down in protest.
Many doubt if Zardari enjoys the hundred percent support from Pakistani army whose ex generals have recently pledged to take the Kashmir movement to its logical end and “eliminate the hurdles” coming in its way.
WHEN Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed as Pakistan's prime minister in 1977, his 24-year-old daughter, Benazir sounded optimistic about General Zia-ul-Haq and expected the coup leader to hold elections in a few months.
A British newspaper recalls Zulfikar’s response: “Don't be an idiot, Pinkie,” said her father, using the nickname inspired by her rosy complexion as an infant, “Armies do not take over power to relinquish it.”
Going by this paternal piece of advice, which Benazir must have shared with her husband, Zardari’s ‘offer’ to India seems more idiotic than Pinkie’s remark. And Indians are not so jumpy that they would celebrate Zardari’s offer because they know what it takes to realize the ideological goals after hitching to a coalition. We still remember how zealously the BJP, after getting lead in elections announced that it would rewrite the Indian constitution to integrate J&K and construct the Ram Temple at Babri Masjid. But the compulsions of a coalition saw their leaders praising Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the icon of secularism.
So Mr Zardari! If you aspire to become Mr 100 percent after Benazir’s death please hold back your crate of mangoes. You should remember the Indian season for the fruit begins from April. Sorry, the mangoes are unripe.
(The article appeared in Rising Kashmir on March 10,2008)
No comments:
Post a Comment