Post Election Pakistan

Except the caretaker government, everyone in Pakistan expected the elections to be massively rigged. It didn’t happen. What happened was the cleanest form of polls, which could have been possible with the current setup.

For the first time in the history of Pakistan, a dictator doffed off his uniform without a drama involving blood. A lot of questions now loom over the newly elected parliament.

The first and foremost issue is of the crushing inflation and economic pressure, Pakistan is going through. Macro-economic policies of the previous government weren’t really keeping in mind the situation with the poorest in the country. As a result, rich became richer while poor became poorer. Whatever was left, oil was there to take care of it

The second, though by some means, more important than the inflation issue, is the problem we are facing with our judicial setup. Of course, a military dictator would never have been comfortable with an independent judiciary. In the beginning, dictator was able to convince the twisted parliament to vote in his favor and was able to keep judiciary from creating troubles for his unconstitutional role. However, with the expiration of the old parliament and with no legal foothold, a strong, independent judiciary is bound to send Musharraf into exile. Whether the parliament will be able to restore the ousted judges or not, is the key question which will define the direction Pakistan will be taking for the next 5 years to come.

Thirdly, war on terror. It’s a strange notion. Now we are at war with a concept. Human learning and experience has taught us to defend our countries against invading armies of men but how do we defend ourselves against a concept ? or how do we defeat a concept we consider to be wrong ? Our American brother thought, a military offensive is the best solution to the problem at hand, and 5 years since the start of war in Iraq, we are deeper into the problem. In my opinion, when one has to fight a concept or defeat an ideology, the only weapon that can be used against it is education. Instead of spending billions on war in Afghanistan and on war in Iraq, only if this money was spent on education in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of these countries would have been much more stable, their people would have felt much more liberated and without doubt, there would have been no threat to the dollar, likes of which we are seeing these days. For Pakistan, the situation is much more difficult then any country on the planet. It shares its borders with Afghanistan from where massive influx of refugees has taken place. These refugees, having lost their relatives as collateral, sought help from their neighbor, Pakistan. However, the dictator ruling Pakistan considered it best to sell his countrymen and innocent refugees to foreign security agencies in the name of “patriotism”, similar of which we have now in US, in the form of an act. They feel betrayed and now are incumbent in avenging the blood of their kins. How this new parliament deals with this situation, will actually weigh the intelligence and effectiveness of this house.

Only a stronger, stable Pakistan can bring peace to this trouble region of the planet.

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