Martial law in the age of globalisation

We should recall that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burnt to ground.

But the General is far smarter.

He can sit back and watch - he's produced a nation of fiddlers By Afiya Shehrbano and Nazish Brohi Some optimistic supporters of President Pervez Musharraf were genuinely taken aback and disappointed at the imposition of Emergency rule on November 3.

Others accepted this as a Martial Law which confirmed the nature of the military state that is Pakistan.

The debate that has gained currency these past few months was whether a 'deal-full' transition to democracy would be the only way to gradually purge the military out of politics or a structural transformation was the meaningful path to substantive change instead.

What followed on the streets of Pakistan by way of protests and imprisonment has thrown up some important socio-political challenges.

Activists who lived and protested through General Ziaul Haq's dictatorship will testify to the brutality of the street experience - especially women, trade unions, what was left of the Left, and oppressed nationalities.

That was not an era of subtle dictatorships just as it was not a time when capitalist authoritarian conservatives, such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, pretended to give a human face to their ugly policies.

Today, the New Right in the US and the New Left in Britain have managed to merge the two ends of the political and economic spectrum such that they have become one.

Conveniently, their enemy is one too, in Bushian terms, 'Islamo-fascism'.

So too, our New Age military rule has played surrogate father to conservatives and liberals alike under a one-item agenda: Islamic extremism.

In Karachi, a group that calls itself the People's Resistance has been out on the streets even since this martial law was imposed.

The movement has used different places, different timings, different banners, but public reaction has largely been the same: mild curiosity, some amusement, and much detachment.

People seem to go about their routine with equanimity.

The malls are thriving, schools, offices and restaurants are open, mind-numbing entertainment is available on television, and as a dispatch of the BBC ridiculously pointed out, the trains are running on time.

Meanwhile, countless people are in jail or on the run.

So, how does the veneer of normality persist? Musharraf, a military strategist, has caught on to international market trends.

Markets instruct us to identify, segment, isolate and target.

It's all in the niches.

The judges were filtered via the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO).

Political parties were segmented via the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO).

The media blackout was another move to impose state definition on private channels of what should make news.

In this post-modern dictatorship, disconnect becomes systemic, what Farzana Bari calls 'split consciousness' endemic, and intellectual opinions that contemplate transformation, become collateral damage.

Zia and Musharraf's ideological differences have played out in public visibility and marketing strategies.

Zia's Islamisation negatively impacted the public sphere, where repression was overt, with lashings and floggings.

Zia ignored or steamrollered the people; Musharraf opiates them instead.

Employment schemes are announced, forex reserves and economic growth figures bandied about, the 'image' 'softens' and most critically, as underlined by the General, mobile phone usage rises drastically.

So in this globalised, market-savvy martial law, there are no boot checks on New Year's eve, entertainment channels increase every month, fashion shows, concerts and fund-raising events abound, the National Academy for Performing Arts and National Art Gallery are established, the General dances on stage on August 14, inaugurates the Kara Film Festival and soon, after trading fatigues for Savile Row, may possibly even cut the ribbon at the Lux Style Awards.

The mean streets of Zia became the coffee-shop lined zamzamas and boulevards of Musharraf.

Just when a state was coming to be seen as benign, failed, weak or abdicative, depending on your ideological location, it reared its hidden face.

What became clear after November 3 is that state brutality is reserved for its own people.

This enables it to collude with all other oppressive forces and uphold feudal social norms, tribal justice systems, landed interests and a political economy that serves the bourgeois class.

Up against the state are groups that have no other space to converge and collect but the street.

Certainly, the lawyers' movement has spearheaded the resistance to Musharraf's government in defence of its own institutional and professional interests.

The argument that this movement compounded the legal with the political is as flawed as the conspiracy theory that this is all part of a well-orchestrated plan to destabilise the country.

Theories abound when we seek to impose logic on people's actions and behaviour, particularly when they rise in an unpredictable manner.

The fact that the lawyers' movement spiralled into a broader demand for the removal of military rule was enabled by a political epiphany that made it clear that dictators spend their entire rule seeking legitimacy and will decimate institutions and imprison chief justices in the wake of this quest.

What made them dangerous were not just the legal challenges to the legitimacy of a military head but precisely that they were backed by street power.

This was more insidious because Musharraf's purported liberal policies should not have offended anyone to take the streets, in theory.

Success or failure of bringing about coloured revolutions is not the only barometer of change.

After all, it took the women's movement a quarter century to change some parts of discriminatory laws that they stood the streets for, year after year.

In retrospect, it may be argued that their street struggle failed and instead it was a long transitionary, negotiated and, yes, compromised legal status that they have achieved.

The question pro-democrats want to ask themselves is: do we want to transition through half-baked, unfinished, mopped up, stop-gap, band-aid measures and run around the field following goal-posts that keep shifting? If we really want to see street politics translated into formal representation, then let's just remove the buffering collaborators of whom there are unfortunately too many - just observe the desperately available caretaker cabinet that fell over itself in submission for their 40-odd days of fame.

If we can rid ourselves of the rationalisers and justifiers of military rule, then we can begin to say that perhaps we have a level playing field.

Otherwise we should recall that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burnt to ground.

But the General is far smarter.

He can sit back and watch - he's produced a nation of fiddlers.

*(Afiya Shehrbano teaches and writes on sociological issues.

Nazish Brohi is an independent researcher).

-(Courtesy: The Friday Times) Climate change: How poorest suffer most