MANI-FESTO

Brothers in disguise

Cyrus Broacha of CNN/IBN’s The Week That Wasn't appears to be the only one to have caught on to the analogy between Tahir-ul-Qadri and Anna Hazare-Baba Ramdev on the one hand and Imran Khan and Arvind Kejriwal on the other, as Pakistan played out its version of the Jan Lokpal agitation.

As in the case of the saint of Ralegaon and the sharpster of Haridwar, Tahir-ul-Qadri is a politician in the guise of a cleric, while Imran Khan is quite as much a loser with mass appeal as was Kejriwal (until Kejriwal lost his mass appeal as well). Khan is also losing his mass appeal. His demand for the scrapping of last year’s election results on the basis of unsubstantiated and delayed charges of rigging was clearly bogus. He was able to gather no more than 20,000 persons at the peak of his nonstop rallies in Islamabad, but was enormously bolstered by the allegedly non-political but simultaneous and well-coordinated crusade for morality in politics by Qadri. So also were Hazare and Ramdev the engine, and Kejriwal no more than the spark plug that brought all three of them to undeserved public notice in 2011.

Qadri’s cause was immensely bolstered by the ham-handed firing on his cadres by the Lahore police, just as Ramdev’s was by P. Chidambaram’s self-defeating order to clear out the protesters in the dead of the night. This was compounded by Chidambaram’s handling of the denial of the Ram Lila grounds to Hazare, followed by Hazare being packed off to Tihar, further followed by Hazare refusing to leave jail till the Ram Lila grounds were restored to him. Given the huge public outrage over Hazare’s detention, the home ministry was forced to let the Delhi municipal authorities spruce up the Ram Lila grounds, thus, in effect, paying for resurrecting a movement that had died the previous December in Mumbai.

Illustration: Bhaskaran Illustration: Bhaskaran

The similarities continue. The Pakistan National Assembly unanimously (except, predictably, Khan’s own party members) rallied behind the government just as our opposition leaders supported the ruling party in its stand that Parliament, and not the streets, was the venue for law making. But just as government negotiations with Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi, Prashant Bhushan and their ilk lent legitimacy to the Hazare gang, Nawaz Sharif’s negotiations with Khan and Qadri lent legitimacy to their demand to replace the elected government with one nominated by the unelected Khan and the unelectable Qadri.

Just like how the delegation of Indian ministers going to Palam to receive Baba Ramdev and cart him off to Claridges turned out to be a dagger twisted into the UPA’s heart, Qadri and Khan’s invitation to negotiate with Sharif might turn into the dagger twisted into the Pakistan government’s heart.

Initially, there were reports that hinted at Sharif seeking army intervention to resolve the impasse. However, Sharif is unlikely to have forgotten that what ended Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s reign was his invitation to the army to quell post-election protests in 1977, which ultimately led to Bhutto’s hanging. Or how Sharif was sentenced to indefinite exile by the army when Pervez Musharraf took over. Just the possibility of an army intervention was enough to drive Qadri and Khan to the negotiation table. So also did negotiations eventually end the stand-off between the Hazare agitators and the UPA government, although they drove a huge wedge between different factions of the Anna movement, just like how conclusive negotiations between Qadri-Khan and the Sharif government are likely to create a huge rift between Khan and Qadri, neither of whom is a natural ally of the other. The moral of the story is that Indians and Pakistanis, for all their mutual hostility, are really brothers under the skin.

Aiyar, former minister, is an MP and a social commentator.