Pakistan:
Campaigns Of
Mass Deception
By Mehroz Siraj Sadruddin
11 January,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Calling politics a game of true deception would not be wrong at all. Over the last two decades or so, we have seen mass deceivers being elevated to the coveted posts of Presidents and prime ministers of their own countries. We have seen some politicians become presidents of the United States and all of them were unique deceivers.
Coming to Pakistan, mass deception is not something that is new to
us. However the only difference in our case being that the office
bearers are totally immune from the public opinion. Even here, we
have seen promises being broken, every few years. The first major
‘campaign of mass deception’ to have ever taken place
in Pakistan was surely the celebration of ten years of General Ayub
Khan’s rule. While his cabinet and top military hierarchy celebrated
the notorious ‘decade of development’ all what the people
of West and East Pakistan could see was the administration’s
drive for pauperising the masses and concentrating all the few economic
gains in the hands of 22 families only. This campaign of mass deception
failed and was wrapped up in no time, as his own military deputy and
his former foreign minister kicked out Pakistan’s first Spartan
autocrat. Khan’s deputy, another Khan, turned out to be an equally
avid ignorant and therefore, deceiver. Even his campaign of mass deception
did not last long. While proclaiming emergency in 1971, Yahya Khan
went on audaciously to say that opting not to go for a military crackdown
in East Pakistan, ‘would be suicidal not to act.’ Replace
Yahya with Musharraf and East Pakistan with the Supreme Court under
Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry, the same shameful techniques
and acts of deception have stayed very much in place thirty six years
later.
Yahya’s campaign of mass deception was not only devoid of any
reality, but also was it of a very comic and unique nature. The military’s
campaign of mass deception was not being planned and executed by professional
spin-doctors and Public Relations firms. In fact, if memory serves
us well, then it must be recalled that just a day or two before the
historic surrender at the Paltan maidan in Dhaka on December 16 1971,
the Commander of the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan, General Aamir
Abdullah Khan ‘tiger’ Niazi, had spoken eloquently about
Pakistan’s insane war effort under the utterly rudderless and
schizophrenic leadership of General Yahya Khan. He expressed his wish
to advance militarily towards Calcutta and beyond. Little did that
ignorant man knew that he would surely go to Calcutta, but not as
the commander of a victorious army, rather as a prisoner of War. Even
at that delicate moment, Pakistan Television was busy running uncensored
state propaganda. Yahya never realised the grave mistake he made by
not allowing western media anywhere in East Pakistan. As India had
given access to Western media correspondents who were reporting from
Calcutta, the Indian propaganda was penetrating down the ranks of
the Western society and the media hands down. This was the ultimate
death blow to Yahya’s campaign of mass deception.
Even as all Western networks were reporting about the military surrender in Dhaka, Pakistan Television was still busy running unprocessed propaganda and it still went on saying that Pakistan Army was well within reach of conquering Calcutta—Mass deception at its best!
There are two major things that actually allow mass deception to get
to the bottom roots of the society, usually unchecked and uncensored.
In the west it is excessive consumerism and in our part of the world,
a largely illiterate and pauperised rural population. I would stick
to Pakistan here. The fact that more than sixty-five percent of our
population is illiterate and lives in poverty, has always worked well
for the bureaucracy, military or civilian. This being so because an
illiterate population, an untrained mind and intellect make the poor
working class people ripe for all kinds of discriminations and deceptions.
This is what has exactly happened in Pakistan. Until recently, the
propaganda of the state was always taken hands down. After all it
was relentless deception techniques and state sponsored propaganda
that brought Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto down to the gallows.
The army has shown time and again that it would do all what it takes
in order to ensure that at all times, the levers of power and authority
in the country, even when there are puppet civilian administrations
at the helm of affairs. The recent confrontation between the Musharraf
administration and the civilian judiciary is a case in the point.
Even after the imposition of emergency, Musharraf’s tone, whenever
he is talking about civilian institutions, has been more confrontational
that conciliatory. In fact, while giving interviews to various international
media, General (retd) Musharraf has gone to the limit to say that
Justice Chaudry was hatching a conspiracy plan to overthrow him. It
was a similar allegation that Musharraf used against former premier
Nawaz Sharif when he tried his best to prevent Musharraf, who was
coming home from a visit to Sri Lanka, to land anywhere in Pakistan.
The allegation might have carried some weight then, but what has now
been shielded of by Musharraf’s leading spin-doctors Mohammed
Ali Durrani, Sher Afghan Niazi, Shiekh Rasheed Ahmed, Malik Mohammed
Qayyum, Sharifuddin Pirzada and not to forget Musharraf’s last
bedfellow who is now no more, Benazir Bhutto is the fact that even
if Justice Chaudry was planning a ‘conspiracy’ against
General Musharraf, even then the Chief Justice would have been acting
well within the framework of the Constitution of 1973. This is primarily
because Musharraf’s wearing of two hats for eight long years
was in itself very much an unconstitutional act and if the Supreme
Court bench that was hearing the cases of his re-election and his
eligibility for that, decided to put him off to some tough questioning,
then it must be known that the Court would have been acting very much
within its constitutional jurisdiction. General Musharraf has been
persistently ignorant of this reality.
A largely pauperised and illiterate population has one another advantage
for the rulers, their memories are pretty short lived and thus they
can be spoon fed with propaganda and fake promises every now and then.
This has happened. When General Zia took over the nation that was
paralysed by two mass movements and the country’s dismemberment,
all within a period of seven to eight years, declared that elections
would be held within ninety days, onwards from July 1977. This declaration
turned out to be a deception and a well-planned establishment tactic
to ensure that the people of Pakistan do not come out on the streets
and protest the way they did against Ayub, on the overthrowing of
the first Bhutto government. Zia’s tactics of mass deception
were indeed well executed through his tenure. The press, the judiciary
and the civil society had been muzzled at will. Also, General Zia
was the one who gave us the normally unique concept of national interest,
another deceptive piece of trash.
According to General Zia, it was in Pakistan’s ‘national interests’, to support the Afghan Jihad in our Western neighbourhood, as an Afghan victory would have prevented the Soviet Union from invading Pakistan. Soviet Union was always looking for getting permanent access to warm water ports, so Pakistan seemed to be the ultimate target after a Soviet success in Afghanistan. The ridiculous dictator, and his equally insane minded schizophrenic mentor, Ronald Reagan were well renowned as being mass deceivers.
While the former strictly followed the instructions of the Jewish
lobbies, like an honest puppet, there the latter used the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan and the economic instability of the 70s era and the
Islamisation hogwash as rubber stamp to continue his unconstitutional
and illegal rule. This was proven amply at the time of the controversial
and sham referendum of 1984 and the heinous non-party elections of
1985. The fact that most of the people of Pakistan who did turn out
to vote in Zia’s referendum figures of which do not exceed ten
percent by any neutral account, said that they wanted the progress
of Islam and Pakistan, was understood by Zia as a gifted high mandate
from the people of Pakistan. No wonder, Benazir Bhutto, whose father’s
blood stains lay on General Zia’s hands, was fast emerging as
a strong leader. Zia and his Islamisation movement had given us the
draconian Afghan cultures and subcultures from which our society has
yet to fully recover.
The civilian politicians of Pakistan, however have not lagged far
behind in organising campaigns of mass deception. They did it throughout
the 1990s and are doing it now, full throttle. Calling the current
electioneering season, a season of campaigning of mass deception would
perhaps be a correct observation. We would start from the Chaudrys
of Gujrat and other top PML-Q leaders. What a committed band of ‘Musharrafites’
are they. They talk about democracy and they talk about devolution
of power to the people. How many of the people who are paid to attend
their rallies really know that Chaudry Shujaat’s father was
a frontrunner in the anti-democracy campaign that led to the ouster
of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1977? How many of the people attending their
rallies really know that Chaudry Shujaat Hussein was a cabinet minister
in the Zia-Junejo administration of the late 1980s? How many of them
know that when the Army chief Gen (r) Mirza Aslam Baig, in collaboration
with the ISI cobbled together the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) in
the early 1990s, as a force against the just dismissed government
of Benazir Bhutto, Chaudry Shujaat and Senator Mushahid Hussein Syed
were not only part of the overall brief setup, but also stood to become
its prime beneficiaries? No wonder Mr. Shujaat and his coterie of
feudalistic ignorant fools do not wish to enlighten the masses about
these realities and have gone on to cross all limits in firmly putting
all blames regarding Pakistan’s follies on the PML-N and the
PPP.
They are not entirely wrong though, but would surely like to wash
their hands off anyways before the general elections.
Enter Benazir Bhutto. The corrupt middle-aged former premier, who
once spoke eloquently about restoring the judges of the Supreme Court
who were deposed after the proclamation of emergency, calmed down
quickly. Reality dawned upon her pretty early that had her massive
street protests, something that she has been able to put up since
her return, materialised and had the judges been restored, striking
down of the National Reconciliation Ordinance would have been one
of their first verdicts. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Iftikhar
Mohammed Chaudry would have obviously declared the NRO as against
the laws and the Constitution of the land, thus automatically reinstating
the corruption cases against her and compelling the government to
arrest Benazir Bhutto.
She dropped down her initial slogan of restoring the judiciary very
soon. The claims and slogans should have been taken with a pinch of
salt anyways. While Benazir claimed to be lending support to the cause
of the judiciary, there on the other hand, she had also disowned her
own former interior minister, the lawyer of the Chief Justice of Pakistan
and the new President of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA),
Aitzaz Ahsan. This fact simply speaks volumes about the level of democracy
within the Pakistan Peoples’ Party. Anyone whom Benazir thought
could prove to be a challenge to her hegemony in the Party, would
be ultimately disowned, at least privately, if not publicly.
While she was busy stashing her bank accounts by pumping in them millions
of dollars of loan and looted money, the situation of women in the
country was getting worse by the day. Honour killings, rapes, murders
etc. were spiking upwards and her government made no concerted efforts
to confront and address these concerned issues head on. Pakistan,
during Ms Bhutto’s tenure had surely seen a rise in the levels
of social inequalities in our society and this had worse affected
the women. However, the top hierarchy of the Pakistan People’s
Party (PPP) has conveniently ignored these facts and the illiterate
masses of Pakistan do not have sufficient intellect and memory to
question the grave follies that this party committed during its years
in power between 1988 and 1996.
Considering these facts, the readers should now question themselves
that is it justified to call such a corrupt personality, who was on
a mission to loot and plunder the nation’s already scarce resources,
be referred at as a martyr now? While I cannot answer with any surety
on behalf of anyone, but based on the above arguments, her assassination
though being condemnable, does not make her eligible for being called
a martyr.
Third player of this game, Mian Nawaz Sharif, is no different. The
Sharif brothers are surely playing their cards close to their chest,
however these two pillars of mass deception, are far from being innocent,
as they portray themselves. Mian Nawaz has emerged as an avowed critic
of General Musharraf over the last two years and has become as a serious
obstacle between Musharraf and the military’s political and
corporate goals and objectives that they would like to achieve in
the near future. He also has mass support, like Benazir. But the relevant
question here is that is he working for the cause of democracy? Is
he really working for the people of Pakistan? Certainly not. Like
Benazir, Nawaz Sharif has had a change of blood since his arrival.
Nawaz Sharif, like ever before is only out there to work for his own
interests. He’s surely as greedy for power, as Miss Bhutto (was)and
Mr. Musharraf. His two terms in power do give relevant evidence of
this.
During his Second tenure, Nawaz got the 8th Amendment to the Constitution,
along with the controversial Article 58 (2B) and replaced it with
the 13th Amendment. If the former was to be a symbol of military and
presidential high handedness, as it was, then the latter could have
been a symbol of autocratic civilian greed for power, had Nawaz Sharif
forced the bill through the parliament in March 2000, as he proposed
to do. Had that amendment been passed, Nawaz Sharif could have crowned
himself the ‘Amir-UL-Momineen,’ of the believers and could
have had other sweeping powers as well, because of which politically
he would have remained unchallenged.
Nawaz Sharif has also been making bogus statements about being a supporter
of a free media. To those who do not know, Nawaz Sharif had been so
much of a gagging irritant for the media and judiciary, that when
he was deposed in October 1999, no one from these two institutions
put up a constitutional challenge against General Musharraf’s
then emergency and the PCO of 2000. The harsh dealings of Nawaz Sharif
with veteran journalist Najam Sethi and the Jang Group, go down to
speak volumes about his real contempt for a free media. It must be
remembered that the two mentioned above, were very vocal critics of
the Nawaz Sharif administration and had been writing and publishing
aggressively about the corruption cases of Mian Nawaz Sharif and Miss
Benazir Bhutto. Many articles of Hamid Mir, who was then a senior
journalist at the Urdu-Language Jang newspaper (in the 1990s), were
also subsequently used by General Musharraf’s legal advisors
as worthy court evidences regarding the filed corruption cases and
other petitions against the two former Prime Ministers. The fact that
Mr. Sethi and the Jang Group were at the forefront of exposing corruption
cases against Mr. Sharif, was the main reason why these two had gone
to bear the wrath of the government, usually in the form of higher
news print costs and withdrawal of government advertisements, not
to forget imposition of high and harsh taxation. So much so for Mr.
Sharif’s claims of being a supporter of a free media.
What the masses have usually failed to determine that what kind of
tactics do these political parties take up in order to ensure perfect
deception. In recent times, the PML-N leader has used his first deportation
as a symbol of both, resistance, that it was not, and the state’s
high handedness, that it was. The brief jump in the popularity of
Nawaz Sharif was not something of a dynamic nature, or a really big
achievement. It was neither a proof of his botched commitment towards
democracy, nor is it anything unusual. This brief jump is a result
of a perceived opposition that he has wielded out to the executive
authority of General (retd) Pervez Musharraf.
The masses must understand that these mass campaigns and rallies are
merely simple ‘deception campaigns.’ Where people are
just being told about pre-packaged and ideologically loaded series
of lies and twisted stories. Nawaz Sharif has never acted out of national
interests and that the All Party’s Democratic Movement (APDM),
that was his own hand creation was initially being used by Nawaz to
further his own interests. Had Nawaz Sharif been a patriot, he would
not have left for Saudi Arabia in 2000, in the first place. He would
have resisted and stayed in jail, but he did not. His decision to
leave the country and move towards Saudi Arabia explains pretty well
that what kind of a heinous coward he really is. However Mr. Sharif
has still not learnt that this time round, only fiery and anti-dictatorial
messages and sermons would not do his job for him.
Those who laud Nawaz Sharif’s stance against General Musharraf
and on the issue of the deposed judges, forget that he not only served
as Punjab’s Chief Minister during the era of a former military-president,
but also was he the first Pakistani Prime Minister to have personally
planned and overlooked an attack on the Supreme Court premises, when
a bench was hearing petitions against various cases of corruption
in which he and his brother were allegedly involved. His stance against
the military dictatorship of General Musharraf is based on one simple
fact, that being that the way his government was toppled and the subsequent
cobbling together of the new political alliances, had no space for
Nawaz Sharif. Another thing that has irked him pretty much were the
mass defections from his party to the new ‘King’s Party.’
Nawaz’s version of his past cozying relationship with General
Zia is actually a dumbfounded and venomously incorrect version of
the actual realities. According to him, he had a ‘close’
relationship with General Zia, but was not his sycophant, as the Chaudrys
are for Musharraf. The reality is however different. General Zia had
propped Nawaz up against the growing strength of the PPP in Punjab.
Nawaz Sharif was indeed his sycophant. He was made the Chief Minister
of Punjab only because he was toeing the General’s line. It
must not be forgotten that it was during Zia’s time and soon
thereafter, that Nawaz Sharif and his faction of the Pakistan Muslim
League, due to their success in cutting down the strength of the PPP
in Punjab, won (and had) the support of the military establishment,
largely through the blessings of General Zia. This continued till
the time when Sharif messed up with General Musharraf, soon after
the latter was appointed the Army Chief by the former.
The three major players in today’s Pakistani politics, the post-BB
Pakistan People’s Party, Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf,
are basically nothing but mass liars and deceivers who during their
own governments have done what they could to silence the judiciary
and the media in order to achieve their feudalistic, selfish and purely
personal political goals and objectives. None of these three can,
or should claim to be stalwarts of democracy in Pakistan, as all of
them have taken extra-constitutional measures during their tenures.
Musharraf however tops the list not only amongst civilian leaders,
but also amongst the military leaders as well. No military ruler in
Pakistan’s history proclaimed a state of emergency twice during
the tenure of his illegal occupation of the corridors of power.
What the masses have genuinely failed to understand over these years
is that rigged and incredulous elections are more of campaigns and
eras of mass deception, betrayals and lies, then anything else. It
is corrupt leaders and elections like we have had in Pakistan, that
undermine the concepts and practical implementation of a free and
unfettered media, a strong system of accountability and ensuring the
independence of the judiciary. It is the ongoing lawyers’ movement
that has brought these issues much to the forefront. Rather than lending
complete support to the cause of the lawyers and the honourable deposed
judges of the Supreme Court, the major political parties of the country,
have done General Musharraf a great favour by taking part in the next
general elections, thus giving them the much needed ‘credibility’.
It is known that rigging would take place to a great extent. The political
parties are just in a competition to come to power. This competition
is being fuelled by the lust that they all garner for the corridors
of power.
Masses have yet again been fooled. Aitzaz Ahsan has said it publicly
that without the support of the major political parties, the lawyers
movement may not be able to achieve its demarcated goals and objectives.
The parties are engaged in yet another campaign of mass deception.
The facts however remain that these parties, whose chiefs were once
referred to by Musharraf as ‘thieves’, have a lot to answer
regarding their mischievous acts of murder, plunder of national economy
and resources, compromise on national security, corruption, etc. But
this would not happen. Firstly because the masses lack the ingredients
of a mass movement and secondly, the true of essence of an independent
judiciary and the constitution is no longer there—in short,
in Pakistan there is so far no strong system of national accountability.
We all know that. Establishing such a system is a tedious and long-term
procedure in which hopefully the current bureaucracy and the establishment
would not invest its resources as they are averse to all forms of
social emancipation for the masses.
Campaigns of mass deception are going on across the length and width
of Pakistan now a days as a deceptive election is right around the
corner. It is high time that the masses understand that how are these
high-pitched campaigns planned, organised and executed and that what
role do foreign powers play and the influence they wield in the overall
decision-making and policy planning procedures. After all, had there
not been the influence of foreign powers in Pakistani politics, Benazir
Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif would not have been roaming around the country
absolutely scott free, despite of having billions of dollars of deliberately
looted national wealth and blood on their hands.
However, with Benazir finally gone, the dynamics have changed a bit
in favour of the Musharraf-led establishment. Mumtaz Bhutto, a former
Chief Minister of Sindh and head of the Bhutto tribe has so far correctly
predicted the future splits in the party because of the handover of
leaders to novices like Bilawal and Asif Zardari. The future, however
does not bode well for the PPP, neither for Nawaz Sharif, but certainly
it would bode well for democracy in Pakistan. This should only happen
if the media and the lawyers’ community continue their credible
protests and struggle for the establishment of the rule of law, supremacy
of the constitution, as it stood in 1973 and freedom of speech, action,
expression and the media in this country. It is only then that the
Army, through massive pressure can be forced back to the barracks,
where it truly belongs and that true and liberal democracy, as envisioned
by the Quaid-E-Azam and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, can be established in
Pakistan.
The writer
has completed his A levels from Foundation Public School in 2007 and
is now working at The News International
