M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — After the Feb. 18
"peaceful" general elections in Pakistan, where "moderate"
candidates overwhelmingly trounced their "extremist" rivals, most
international commentators have agreed with the Pakistani analysts nesting in
think tanks across the United States and elsewhere that the country's slide
into chaos will decelerate and may even be reversed.
No less an expert on third world elections
than U.S. Senator John Kerry has pronounced the Pakistan poll to have
"credibility and legitimacy," a sentiment apparently shared by his
colleague, Joe Biden. In fact, the election results indicate that the poll was
less than fair, although conditions on the ground clearly made the manipulation
less than completely effective.
While the Pakistan People's Party -- which
was expected abroad to secure a majority on the basis of the
"sympathy" vote following the killing of Benazir Bhutto -- got 87 of
the 287 contested seats, Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League won just 66, a
performance at variance with ground reality, which had indicated the party
would register a much better performance.
Given the dodgy reputation of Bhutto's
widower and newly anointed PPP leader, A.A. Zardari -- plus the fact that her
visible eagerness to do the bidding of Washington had cost her much popularity
in a society that is, after the Palestinian territories, one of the most
anti-United States in the world -- the PPP ought to have come second to
Sharif's PML(N), instead of emerging as the largest single party. Clearly, and
contra-intuitively, the fact that the PPP has not-so-secretly been in parleys
with Musharraf helped rather than hurt, despite the loathing with which most
Pakistanis regard their head of state.