Condemned to Repeat History

In every case, selfstyled prophets of change in Pakistan have failed to deliver on their promises.

In the wee hours of the night of 5 November 1996, Pakistan´s President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari summarily dismissed the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on charges of corruption and ineffective governance. In and of itself, the event was neither unexpected nor necessarily surprising (given the fate of earlier custodians of the prime minister´s mantle in Pakistan). For many Pakistanis, this brought back memories of the earlier power struggle between Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Nawaz Sharif; or, for that matter, between Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Benazir Bhutto. According to Ms Bhutto, an equally relevant precedent was the struggle between General Ziaul Haq and her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (and, proving once again that ironies do indeed multiply, let us not forget that Ziaul Haq was chosen by Z.A. Bhutto to become the Chief of Army Staff primarily because he was considered "utterly reliable"exactly the criterion applied by Ms Bhutto in selecting Farooq Leghari for the presidency).

Others, who tend to take a longer view of things and whose sense of history is not tainted by the partial accounts of events contained in ´official´ textbooks, were reminded of further precedents Mohammad Ali Bogra and Ghulam Mohammad; Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy and Iskandar Mirza; Malik Feroze Khan Noon and General Ayub Khan (see table). My own thoughts, however, were transported even further back into history to the power struggle for the Moghul throne between Aurangzeb Alamgir and his elder brother Dara Shikoh.