He wants to tell you the tale of Soldier, Sardar Yar Muhammad Rind does. This was the nickname of a village idiot back home in Bolan. A toughie himself, Soldier’s role model was a maternal uncle who, whenever he would chance upon a snake, even a dangerous one, wouldn’t call for his gun or staff but would pick the serpent up with his bare hands and start spinning it around. He would then proceed to slam it on the ground, killing it.
One day, Soldier saw a snake himself and decided he was also a man now and would follow suit. So he picks up this snake. Now he was strong enough to pick it up but even strongmen know what heavy feels like. It was only then that he actually looked at the snake and realised that this was no ordinary snake but a huge viper. Mortified, he would not slam it to the ground for fear it won’t die and attack him. So he just kept on spinning it. Stuck perpetually in — and not moving beyond — the initial spinning motion of a discus thrower, Soldier was quite the (as mentioned before) idiot.
“So, yes, Soldier was a bit like Aslam Raisani is right now,” says Rind. Clinging on desperately to the portfolio of the chief minister, Raisani, he says, is afraid of what will happen to him when he lets go. There are many hornets’ nests that he has poked in. He has bitten off far more than he can chew.
The Raisani and the Rind tribes have been at war since some time now. The tribes’ numerical strengths, however, aren’t the same. As Rind gleefully points out, his nemesis tribe is much smaller. But perhaps, a learning curve with the media, an understanding of the sensibilities of urban audiences and the latter’s distaste for tribalism have brought about certain changes in Rind’s talking points.
“I want to point out that we have no problem with the Raisani tribe. Our issue is with these four Raisani brothers and some of their cronies, who do not represent the whole of the Raisanis. In fact, their eldest brother, Nawab Aminullah Raisani, who is currently Pakistan’s ambassador to Oman, is not at war with us. There had been a settlement with him and his tribe in Kalat,” says Rind.
“The Aslam Raisani that I criticise is not the tribesman but the chief executive of the Balochistan government. See, our tribes have been fighting since 29 years. I have never taken that fight to the media. Because that is our personal, tribal feud. His administration, on the other hand, isn’t.”
So, what is his gripe against the chief minister then? What merits the dissolution of the elected government that first Rind, and now, the Balochistan chapter of Raisani’s own PPP demands?
“He has been chief minister for four-and-a-half years. Would you kindly ask him how much of that time he has spent in Balochistan and how much he has spent in Islamabad, Dubai and Malaysia?”
“What I want to ask is, does Pakistan’s most sensitive province, one which is embroiled in a separatist movement, one that occupies 43.7 per cent of Pakistan’s landmass, one that has a 700 kilometre coastline, deserve a chief minister who can’t even handle himself?”
But doesn’t democracy afford people the right to elect a bad government?
“True. No objections to people’s democratic rights. They have this right. But we wouldn’t be objecting if we thought he had been elected by the people,” he says.
“He should be asked how many times he has become an MPA and how many times he has lost the elections from there. Is this election constituency actually his? Only by spreading a linguistic hatred did he get this vote.”
But even if a person gets elected from a constituency for the first time and steps into the house for the first time, if the other representatives elect him, doesn’t that make him the chief minister?
“But in which democratic system do the majority members elect the minority party? The PML-Q’s 17 members who voted for him should be asked this. He wasn’t a party member or even an ally. Only because certain decisions were made above (at the party’s federal level) the majority voted for a minority.”
The vagaries of parliamentary politics? “Ok, that is a part of democracy but where does a person like this get a full five years? Does this happen in Japan, where leaders are replaced after one year, maybe two years?”
But that does happen through the Diet, the Japanese parliament, an in-house affair. “But how can it be done in-house here, with 62 members out of 65 actually in power. Does this happen in any democracy?”
“Is loot and plunder democracy? Don’t the national parties have a role towards democracy?”
The senior politician then goes on to describe the province’s woes. Health, education, law and order, the works.
“Senior doctors are on strike. The businessmen, the doctors, the lawyers, they’re all being kidnapped.”
But what if the same argument is used by a dictatorial usurper about the national government? That the PPP government should be deposed because they can’t manage things. After all, the kidnapping rackets loom large in the rest of Pakistan as well.
“Yes. But no-one has ever alleged that Zardari or Bilawal themselves are involved in this kidnapping trade or other plundering. Here, his own house is involved. His brothers, they are all in on it,” he argues.
“We have also been in power. We haven’t been upto this kind of business. Even as we speak, there are rockets being fired at my home. Who has given him this right?”
Rind famously used to be the only opposition member in the Balochistan assembly, albeit one who wouldn’t go to the house himself. As the situation in Balochistan went from bad from to worse, and the gaffe-prone chief minister made one fumble after another, Rind’s protests started getting more attention in the media.
But two discrete events that really brought Rind’s case to the forefront. One was the Supreme Court’s interim order. Criticised by pro-democracy activists as all but ordering the federal government to install a sort of governor’s raj in the province, the order stated that the government of Balochistan had “lost its constitutional authority” to rule the province.
The other was the PPP’s Balochistan chapter’s request to the party’s central secretariat to dissolve their own provincial government.
These salvos were fought off by the chief minister’s men by the resounding vote of confidence that the Raisani government received in the provincial assembly on the 13th of November.
“So? The Supreme Court had never said the government had lost its majority in the house. It said it had lost its constitutional authority as a result of not fulfilling its constitutional duties. Therefore, it is the moral duty of party members and allies to remove him from his post and elect someone else,” he says.
Well, since the representatives didn’t fulfil this definition of moral duty, Rind says the president should ask the governor to, in turn, ask the assembly members to elect someone else.
And if they still elect him? “Then we have no problem.”
Therein lies Yar Muhammad Rind’s problem. It stands to reason that if they have chosen him now, they’ll choose him again. Specially since, as he points out himself, given that only four months are left, no one wants to leave their ministries.
But if it is indeed only four months that are left, why not just let him complete his tenure?
“You don’t know what he is capable of doing even in four months. And the person who will become interim chief minister with his consent will never allow for a free and fair election.”
But doesn’t the system, as it stands, stipulate that the consensus on the interim chief minister has to be reached between the current chief minister and Rind himself, in his capacity as the opposition leader?
“He won’t. Till this day, he hasn’t even declared me the official leader of the opposition. He would ask a minister of his to resign, make him apply for his slot and give it to him to get his handpicked caretaker setup.”
Interestingly enough, later during the course of the interview, Rind actually did receive a phone call informing him that Tariq Magsi, the governor’s younger treasury benches MPA brother, had appealed to the assembly secretariat to appoint a leader of opposition. The rumour in Quetta is that the younger Magsi is to take up this slot himself, right at the fag end of the tenure.
Rind is a rustic and charming politician, with better presentation skills than the mercurial Raisani. But it would seem Raisani has won this particular battle. What happens in the tinderbox that is Balochistan is anyone’s call. It would be curious to see what happens to Rind, who says he will contest the elections on the PML-Q ticket.
He parried a question about what role the military played in the jigsaw puzzle that is Balochistan. “It is a very difficult one to answer,” he said evasively.
For those curious to hear the end of what happened to the Soldier mentioned in the beginning: the poor chap was discovered lying unconscious on the ground, and the serpent was also lying dead a little farther away. For Balochistan’s sake, it is hoped the analogy doesn’t turn out to be accurate.
