Date with fate: Pak goes to make-or-break vote

Not in recent memory has there been an election that has attracted so much attention, despite it being well known that it won’t amount to much. It reflects the world’s anxiety over Pakistan. It also reflects how much the world wants the Pakistan ship to right itself with these elections and sail out of troubled waters. It’s called wishful thinking. Here’s why.
The last time there was so much anticipation when Pakistan went to the polls, it was 1970. The polls then were acknowledged by all to be as good as polls get. They were seen to make or break Pakistan, quite literally.
They were also held under another military man, Gen Yahya Khan. The result was unpalatable to most of the Pakistan army, to Yahya Khan and, more importantly, to the then king’s party, the PPP, led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The PPP had a majority in West Pakistan. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League had made a clean sweep of all seats, save two, in East Pakistan. Despite the numbers advantage, Yahya Khan did not invite Mujibur Rehman to form the government.
He delayed convening the then National Assembly, favouring calling Bhutto, who had threatened to boycott the assembly and protest against any government that Mujib was called to form. He opposed Mujib’s autonomy plans and hated the idea of a Bengali ruling over West Pakistan, like the Pakistan army. And he wanted to be invited to form the government.
The political deadlock was the immediate provocation for martial law and Mujib’s declaration of the independence of Bangladesh in March of 1971. East Pakistan’s assertion of its Bengali identity was never understood in West Pakistan, which saw it with suspicion and treated it as a secessionist movement.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s democratic credentials were questionable even then. When Gen Zia-ul Haq deposed him on 5 July 1977, he had been accused of massively rigging the elections that year. He was however, tried and hanged on an entirely different charge of a political murder.
Here’s the curious twist to history. Today’s PPP, led by Bhutto’s daughter’s husband, fears massive rigging and threatens to take the fight to the streets, if that happens. In the same breath, it is willing to sup with the devil and form a government of national consensus.