Related Stories MUMBAI'S MEN AT WORKSUCH A LONG JOURNEY"WHY CAN'T CHINA JUST STAY ON AS A GOOD NEIGHBOUR WITH US?"ON THE TRAIL OF WINGED DEATHTHE MAN AND HIS DREAM MACHINE

IT’S the night of Sunday, February 17, the night before Pakistan goes for the “mother of all elections”, and in posh seaside Clifton area in Karachi, a group of about 150 young men in 15 cars and tempos and a dozen bikes are dancing to the tune of a Benazir Bhutto song in full volume. Waving the Pakistan People’s Party banners and flags, these young men are dancing, clapping, shouting, laughing.

That is the first sight of pure relief and happiness in Pakistan that I see in the past two months of my fly-in-fly-out visits to the country, after what can be described as a ‘stressful’ period in the country’s history. After eight years of military rule, people don’t know whether it’s over yet. And after months of collective depression, it is as if these young men—most of them studying or unemployed—have sniffed victory in Karachi’s cool sea-breeze nine hours before the country goes to the polls.

The stress of eight years had reached a crescendo after January 27, when Benazir Bhutto—Pakistan’s Mohtarma, as she is respectfully called, was assassinated in a confusing mix of bullets, bombs and a motor car’s sun-roof. Sitting in Benazir’s home in Bilawal House, Benazir’s personal aide Aizaz Durrani remembers, “Grown-up men cried that day, not just because BB was killed but because our hopes of a better Pakistan had been snuffed out.”

The tension is palpable from the first person I talk to after landing in Lahore, within 48 hours of Benazir’s assassination. “There is lot of stone-pelting, car-smashing going on throughout the city. This is the first trip I am making...what can I do, can’t sit at home, have to earn a living,” said Sagheer Ali, a taxi driver with City Radio cabs.

We pass by smashed cars, burly policemen, barricades and closed petrol pumps covered with shamianas, ironic reminders of happier times. Huge portraits of Benazir, Nawaz Sharif, Perveiz Elahi, waving at us, dot the city.
As I criss-crossed the streets of Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi—in December-January and then in February—the cuss-words were all reserved for the ruling regime.

Everywhere I go, I am told about the rise in prices of ghee, aata, petrol and other basic items. One young man, Ashraf who is doing his Bsc from a Lahore college, asks me, “What is the price of aata in India, how expensive is ghee there?” I tell him I have no idea and have to check. He replies, “It has become very expensive here...have no option but to do odd-jobs like taking tuitions, but that doesn’t make up for the money I need...so I am here for the meeting, they said they will pay if I campaign for them.”
He is one of the young men in Sharif’s PML (N) local campaigning office in Guldasht town.

Fazal, a cleaner in the hotel, tells me, “My wife in Peshawar told me there is shortage of flour in the village, so she had to buy rice....it is very difficult to survive like this, my parents are not used to eating rice.”
As I file my reports in the hotel room, power cuts interrupt my work. The hotel reception says, “There are eight-hour power cuts in the city...our back-up can’t handle the load beyond a point.”

A friend in a prominent newspaper in Lahore tells me that the country is facing a huge power crisis, with 20 per cent shortage of power. Only 9,000 MW of power are available in the country, as compared to a demand for 11,000 MW.
As I roam around Islamabad and Rawalpindi, from one party office to another, I meet mostly young men, with struggle writ large on their faces. I ask them what they do, apart from canvassing. All of them, barring one or two, have a regular job to depend on. Says Mansoor, a PPP party worker in Islamabad, who is in his 20s, “We are all waiting for the new government to come...want the bomb blasts to stop, so that more and more companies can come and hire us.”

The unemployed youth sit around and chat in street corners, and arrange for the corner meetings of neighbourhood politicians. “No big politician is having big meetings and rallies, everyone is scared of suicide bombers,” Mansoor says, showing me a rifle in his car, which he says is for his protection.
Aren’t the security forces checking everyone’s cars, I ask him and he replies, “They see the car with the party flag and then they let us go, because they know we need (the weapon) for our safety.”

The fear of bombs is very much there in Lahore, when my friend gets a call on his cellphone from his daughter who is studying in an elite school. This is three days before the polls. Panic-stricken, my friend rushes to the school. It turns out to be a hoax, and later, we hear there were hoaxes in four such schools in Lahore. “How can one live in peace, when such scares are a reality?” he says.

In such times, bomb scares are common and with even politicians seeking refuge under heavy security cover. Some are giving big public appearances, a norm before any election, a miss for fear of such incidents. Whether it is Benazir’s Bilawal House in Karachi’s Clifton area, Perveiz Elahi’s house in Lahore’s Gulberg or Nawaz Sharif’s Model Town home in Lahore, or Asif Ali Zardari’s house in Islamabad, these have walls that are 10 to 15 ft tall, and policemen check the ID cards and frisk people thoroughly before letting them in.

The security is such that there are restrictions to where visiting journalists go. My visa is stamped with “cannot go to cantonment area”. What this means in Lahore is that technically I can’t step out of the airport since one has to cross the cantonment to enter the city.

In these times of tension, there is one good thing has happened to Pakistan’s people, at least those I met during my travel to urban Pakistan. After years of misrule, people are more aware, more conscious of their political rights. Says Munir Ahmed, who sells books on Islamabad’s streets, “We don’t want just the rights to food and work, but the right to liberty, the right to life.”

Ads By Google