By Nadeem F. Paracha
A blogger makes a valid point in a recent blog on dawn.com. He suggests that the reason why recent election rallies in Gilgit-Baltistan are so diagonally different from those held in the rest of Pakistan is perhaps due to the lack of militant madressahs and the concept of political Islam in that area.
He is also right to note that the language and the overall content of the recent rallies by almost all the leading political parties there are squarely concentrated on various economic and development issues; whereas political rallies held by the same parties elsewhere in Pakistan are usually studded with impassioned sloganeering and jingoistic takes on Islam, India, Jews and America. The general aura of these rallies also smacks of a xenophobic and chauvinistic exhibition of ‘patriotism.’
Till about the late 1960s, political rallies, rather their content, were largely different in Pakistan. The people’s economic wellbeing and the country’s economic progress used to be the focus of the speakers at these rallies. However, things in this respect began to change with the consolidation of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (as an opposition leader) in 1967.
Already a gifted orator, Bhutto took his cue from the celebrated speakers of the 1960s’ leftist student leaders who in their passionate outbursts addressed economic issues using rhetorical Marxist lingo and revolutionary bravado.
In his speeches at the time, Bhutto too addressed economic issues faced by the people, but he began to use more and more revolutionary symbolism and lingo trying to work the crowds into a captivated frenzy, just like Mao Tse Tung was doing during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Aggressive vocal posturing became a hallmark of the Bhutto rallies, but this aggression got its first physical manifestation when during the 1970 election campaign, hoards of Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and its student wing, the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) activists, started to attack Bhutto rallies.
In his book, Pakistan People’s Party: Rise to Power, Phillip E. Jones states that PPP rallies became a target of the JI and IJT activists who, incensed by Bhutto’s leftist rhetoric, labelled him as ‘anti-Islam’ and a ‘kafir.’ Till then political rallies were usually attacked and dispersed by government-hired hooligans and the police, so this was perhaps the first time one political party was attacking another party’s rally.
Jones further writes that to counter these attacks by the JI and IJT, the PPP formed the ‘People’s Guards.’ These were groups of tough young men picked from various leftist student organisations, especially the National Students’ Federation (NSF) that was supporting Bhutto. A number of clashes took place between the ‘People’s Guards’ and the JI activists during the 1970 election campaign.
The tone of Bhutto’s speeches became a lot more aggressive after he came to power in 1972 — especially from 1974 onwards, when smitten by the sudden turn that the ideology of Pakistan took after the East Pakistan debacle, both Bhutto and his political-religious opponents began using ‘Islam’ a lot more frequently. It was the Bhutto government which presided over the change of direction Pakistan’s history and school books took after the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan. It was also Bhutto who had Ahmadis declared as non-Muslim.
Dawn for more