Chakwal Diary: The MMA is the real dragon's teeth

My faith in Providence, always strong, has been reinforced immeasurably by my not making it to this National Assembly, for which I stood and lost.

Sour grapes? Not really. The more I see of it - from a distance, let me hasten to clarify - the more I thank my stars for being saved from a profound embarrassment.

We are a nation of lawyers and while being supremely unaware of realities on the ground are great ones for drawing subtle distinctions between the legal and the illegal.

The greatest issue before the National Assembly seems to be whether the Legal Framework Order is part of the constitution or not. By the same token, whether the members took their oaths on the pure 1973 constitution or the version amended by the LFO.

Such discussions may be distasteful to Gen. Musharraf and his colleagues for who likes to be told that he has no title to what he is holding. But at the end of it, does it really matter?

The great tribunes in the National Assembly will keep arguing these points while Musharraf remains president with the power to send the assembly home. He also keeps his uniform on. If this is the new face of Pakistani democracy, what's so wrong with autocracy? And if in the National Assembly the leading broker of democracy is my friend Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, what more is to be said of this conclave?

True, some smart-looking young women have made it to the National Assembly, most although not all of them on reserved seats. Their presence can surely be counted as one of the good things to flow from the high tide of the Musharraf revolution.

I saw one of these young ladies at a recent party in 'Pindi. Very striking, the looks I mean. We can be sure there would be a frisson in this house unlike in any other before. Some of these ladies will surely make a splash as much with their speeches as their couture.

Still, the important thing is not so much who is in as who is out. So many stalwarts out in the cold: the PPP's husband-and-wife leadership, the Sharif brothers, the decimated ANP, Baloch tribals hit by the graduation clause.

Barring the smart ladies (may their tribe increase) who's in reads like a roll call of the faceless. Apparatchiks from the old Nawaz League inveigled into the Q League, assorted PPP veterans and the fresh enthusiasts of the clerical brigade who have stormed into the National Assembly in such numbers for the first time.

But is there any sense of occasion or drama about this assembly? What momentous questions is it expected to debate or settle? None whatsoever because far from ringing in a new order it will merely perpetuate the old. This is not the rolling back of military rule but rather its continuation by other means. And under a more acceptable fig-leaf.

The National Assembly can make a lot of noise and you bet it will. But that's all. It is not the Estates General of the French Revolution. No one need have any fears on this score.

Chaudhry Amir Hussain, a prince of incompetents in Nawaz Sharif's last cabinet, has been elected speaker and as I write these lines the National Assembly is meeting to elect the prime minister.

A reporter - a nice-sounding French lady, as it so happened - called me yesterday here in my village of Bhagwal (where I plan to camp for the winter) to ask me whether Jamali would get the required number of votes. I told her I was certain he would. Why was I so sure? Because I have a fair idea of the power of the establishment and the weakness of our politicians.

All the same, what does it matter? This is one prime ministerial election which has generated the least interest in our entire history. Firstly, because of its predictability.

Secondly, because most people with any interest in politics are smart enough to know that whoever becomes prime minister will make not the slightest difference to the way our republic is run or its affairs are mismanaged.

Not having a TV set before me (no small mercy this) I am deprived of the pleasure of watching the NA proceedings being telecast live.

But a friend informs me that the honourable members are heatedly discussing the Legal Framework Order. If the opposition parties had reservations about the LFO they should have asked the military government to clarify the issue before they agreed to attend the assembly.

But after agreeing to every shifting of the goal posts by the government this hair-splitting, although still highly principled, comes a bit late in the day.

That our generals have a mess on their hands goes without saying. This is perhaps not what they had bargained for. Not too long ago the chief of our generals plumed himself on his seemingly great popularity. That's how he got sucked into the black hole of the referendum.

So great he thought was his popularity that on his coattails his supporters in the Q League would coast easily to victory. It has taken all the intelligence agencies' might and guile to give the Q League a respectable showing in the elections. Since then it has taken more effort to swing the requisite number of votes behind Jamali.

All this has come under the rubric of Gen. Musharraf's promises to the nation. In his self-laudatory speech on Wednesday evening he said that he has kept all his promises. True enough, he has stuck to his self-declared timetable but how.

If all the political engineering we have seen is an example of promises kept then at least on this reckoning it were best to have promises broken. More of such promises and we won't have much of a constitutional tradition left.

Ah, the telephone rings again. My informants glued to their TV sets - I am still talking of Bhagwal - say Jamali stands elected with 172 votes, just on the hairline of victory. Come to think of it, with all the resources of the state thrown in, it is not much of a victory.

It would even have been less had the PPP and the MMA made common cause. But right until the end Ms Bhutto preferred to play a role both unprincipled and witless. First negotiating with one lot, then the other, she ended up with nothing.

Still, congratulations not so much to Jamali as to the invisible masters of our destiny who have pulled another one out of their collective hat. They created the PPP's splinter bloc whose 10 votes were crucial for Jamali to win. It was again the army and its agencies which brought the MQM's 17 members on board by launching a crackdown on the MQM Haqiqi rivals in Karachi.

Remember it was the army which created the Haqiqis back in 1992-3 to challenge the authority of MQM supremo Altaf Hussain. A decade later it is the Haqiqis who have been sacrificed (or have they?) to win over Altaf Hussain. These are the games our saviours play.

As for Jamali, what will he make of the greatness thrust on him? He's a nice soul - the last description of the spineless - and he shouldn't be expected to rock any boat. In Balochistan the Jamalis have never been known as rebels, swimming always with the tide, a quality PM Jamali now brings to Islamabad. This should endear him to the republic's uniformed president.

The PPP will sit nominally on the opposition benches but for any real difference of approach with the new government it could well be sitting