Hope in the land of the pure

There is never a dull moment in the Pakistan polity, with what the erudite call "fissiparous tendencies" erupting all over all the time. This was as true during the month of March as in any other. The Karachi cauldron boiled over once again as the Mohajir factions of Altaf and Haqiqui went after each other even as the former threatened to withdraw from its alliance with the Pakistan Muslim League (Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif´s party) in governing Sindh.

If Sindh was unstable, the Punjab-dominated national government was seeing other provinces generate pressures with renewed urgency. Once again, the debate between provincialism and centralism began to pick up steam, with the proponents of the "Pakistan Ideology" calling for strict adherence to a tight-knit nation-state ruled from Islamabad. Parties which were till a few weeks ago regarded as in the mainstream suddenly became "anti-national" in the minds of some.

Nawaz Sharif´s national alliance in Islamabad was weakened when the Awami National Party of the nwfp, a partner of nine years´ standing, decided to opt out of the coalition. The trigger was the Prime Minister´s sudden amnesia regarding a promise made to rename the North West Frontier Province "Pakthunkhwa". This is an important matter for the Pakhthuns (Pathans), who make up the majority in the province, and who want the name change since the Sindhis have Sindh, the Punjabis Punjab and the Balochs Balochistan.

Balochistan, meanwhile, was unsettled. The use of its abundant resources for the greater national good – particularly for the benefit of Punjab province and the city of Karachi – has always rankled and the Balochs are growling. While there was that small (or not so small) matter of dropping the ´u´ from "Baluchistan" and replacing it with an ´o´, even more significant was the tussle with Islamabad regarding the withholding of funds for the province.

The national and provincial party alignments and structures seem hardly capable of tackling the many challenges facing the country, other than providing band-aid treatment. For all his much-vaunted success in centralising power so as to be able to do the things required to steer Pakistan along a proper course, the Prime Minister´s Muslim League is no longer as strong as it was just a few weeks ago in the National Assembly.

The government´s power presently rests on the disarray of the opposition. Benazir Bhutto is far out in the cold, her credibility ripped apart by the unfolding corruption scandal with her husband as the prime accused. In mid-March, Benazir did get together with other anti-PML parties and factions to launch the Pakistan Awami Ittehad (PAI), but this is no more than an opportunistic alliance to fight the PML. "Everybody having pro-Pakistan thinking must support the PAI movement," said a pai spokesman, but no one was taking the pronouncement seriously.

Meanwhile, also over the course of March, Pakistan held its first census in 18 years, counting people and households. Holding a census is a necessary exercise for all kinds of obvious reasons. You cannot run a country without knowing how many there are and what the demographic characteristics are. But here, a census holds out the possibility of further destabilising a country that lives on the edge. One official of the statistics division said, "It [the census] is likely to create more problems than it will solve," and he may well be right.

The Ahmadiyas, persecuted by the state this past decade for espousing "un-Islamic" tenets, decided to make a major policy shift when they announced that they would not register as Muslims during the census. There is actually a retrogressive line in the census form itself which denounces the Ahmadiyas, and which has to be acknowledged by all who describe themselves as Muslim.

But, for a country that is getting ever-more mired in the whirlpool of regional, sectarian, and linguistic suspicion, the census exercise may yet yield a positive outcome. As a columnist wrote in The Dawn of Karachi, one just has to make the best of a poor situation. The outcome of the census may be disruptive and may lead to new upheavals in the political arena, he wrote, "but it will not be a bad thing if the census can bring our inherent animosities into the open and intensify our conflicts to a level where some resolution may be possible." So there is hope.