There could not be a logical link, but it is a fact that almost immediately after Pir Pagaro died, that there was another confrontation between the government and the military over the Memogate affair. Though the Prime Minister whose government would have been brought down, Yousuf Raza Gilani, was related to Pir Pagaro by marriage, that was not the reason why his government was going to go.
Of course, if one is to go by what he had to say, there was no crisis. Well, yes, the seventh Pir Pagaro was no more, but his government was not in danger. The late Pir was a Leaguer, and Gilani belongs to the PPP, while Shah Mehmood Qureshi is with the Tehreek-i-Insaf. But the funeral wasn’t an all-parties show, for Gilani and Qureshi were not there in their political capacities, but as gaddi nashins. You know, Gilani is heir to two very major gaddis, those of Musa Pak and of Bibi Pak Daman, while Qureshi of Bahauddin Zakariya, who is as much a symbol of Multan as Data Ganj Bakhsh Ali Hajveri is of Lahore. And though Ali Hajveri’s Urs was marked on Saturday, the Urs of Bahauddin Zakariya is not. And Data Sahib doesn’t have a gaddi nashin, otherwise Lahore’s politics would have been even more complicated. Or maybe it would have been simpler. The gaddi nashin would have won.
You know, though gaddi nashins have always been in politics, this is the first time we have had a gaddi nashin for PM. That must be why the PM was at the funeral prayer, but not the President. At first sight, it might seem that the PPP wasn’t welcome, but then not just Gilani was there, but so was Sindh CM Qaim Ali Shah, and not only was Zardari absent, but so was Sindh Governor Ishratul Ebad. Perhaps they, not being Pirs, didn’t really qualify to come. Qaim Ali Shah, being a Syed, did. It would have been appropriate for the MQM to have been seen paying its last respects, for it had taken away the Muhajir vote of the interior, which the Pir had once controlled, away from him, and the seats it had in Mirpur Khas and Sukkur, were once held by those who had the Pir’s support.
And though Pakistan will probably miss one of its most loyal sons, one who resisted both the PPP and the Sindhi nationalists, Pakistanis will miss the predictions. The Pir was a lord of the language, who couched his predictions in a language all his own. An idiolect, linguists like to call it. He was able to make bilingual puns, and I can tell from personal experience that when he made one of his puns which crossed about two or three languages (Sindhi, and Urdu via Hindustani, being an example), reporting it in English was a nightmare. But I did it for this paper, because that was only a little nightmare, part of the bigger nightmare of reporting the Pir.
Understand, he didn’t intend it to be a nightmarish experience. He tried to make it fun. And he was certainly very different from other politicians, who try to be as predictable as possible. The Pir, on the other hand, tried to make the whole experience memorable. One problem was that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. That made him pick and choose who covered him. That didn’t go down well with newspapers. But then, the Pir was a very private person, who had come into a very public vocation, and I don’t mean just politics, but even being a Pir. Anyhow, he was an example of the old adage that human beings don’t need to be consistent.
Though Pir Pagaro wanted the Prime Ministership, it was more as a tribute to this Pir-ship rather than because he saw it as an honour in itself. Prime Minister Gilani should keep this in mind. Sooner or later (sooner, the way things are going), he will no longer be PM, but he will still be gaddi nashin of Musa Pak. That is an honour no one can take away from him. Thus he should not take last week’s spat with the military too much to heart. By the same token, maybe the President should. If he is not President, he is just Asif Ali s/o Hakim Ali, Qaum Zardari Baluch Sakna Zila Nawabshah. Maybe he will also be PPP Co-Chairman, but for how long? Bilawal will come back sooner or later, and if his mother’s treatment of her own mother is anything to go by, it seems that the President has something at least to think about, if not necessarily worry.
I’ve noticed that people are a little tired of the confrontation. There are two obvious solutions, and though both have been popular in the past, neither is really very popular now, because the desire is selfish, I’m referring to elections, or military rule. It seems that neither is expected to solve people’s problems. In a way, that shows that the real purpose of government is to solve people’s problems. Military rule doesn’t, and this elected government hasn’t. True, nobody sees the purpose of military rule as being the rule of the CMLA, or Chief Executive, or whoever, though it seems the purpose of the PPP government is to make sure that Bhutto’s son-in-law is President.