Lessons from past crises.

PAKISTAN'S political crisis is deepening with every passing day. The fact that the Punjab Assembly election that was scheduled for April 30 has been delayed to Oct 8 by the Election Commission has further vitiated the political climate. Although Pakistan is in the grip of multiple crises including an unprecedented economic crunch and mounting security threats, it is the political crisis that is at the heart of all crises. If the political system were fully functional, it could focus on and address all other crises.

After the general election of 1970 in united Pakistan, the two largest parties, the Awami League in East Pakistan led by Sheikh Mujib and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan, faced a constitutional deadlock as Sheikh Mujib insisted on his six-point programme which was not acceptable to Bhutto. Despite extreme polarisation, the two parties held more than one round of negotiations, but sadly, an agreement could not be reached and ultimately the military struck, leading to Mujib's arrest, civil war and the breakup of Pakistan.

The political leadership of a truncated Pakistan, led by Bhutto, picked up the pieces of a broken, demoralised Pakistan in 1971 and built it back after giving the country a unanimously adopted Constitution in 1973. This was made possible because even Bhutto's bitter political rivals, including the National Awami Party's (NAP) Wali Khan and Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo, Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan's (JUI) Mufti Mehmood, towering independent leader Sardar Sherbaz Mazari and many others were willing to sit with him and his party and complete the arduous task of framing a constitution by incorporating all or most of the competing demands of diverse political parties.

One should pay tribute to the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who stepped back from many of his own political preferences in order to carry with him the entire spectrum of political leadership of what was left of the country. Political give-and-take, although much maligned and misunderstood in our part of the world, was accepted as a legitimate way of taking the political process forward.

Had the political system been fully functional, it could have addressed all our crises.

The provincial governments of NAP and JUI in Balochistan and the erstwhile NWFP were sacked by president Bhutto a few months before the passage of the 1973 Constitution but the two aggrieved parties and their leaders did not allow the bitterness to...