The leadership vacuum

It is pleasing to note that Pakistan Day 2018 passed off peacefully across the country. There were parades and celebrations in all corners of the land, and men, women and children waved flags, sang patriotic songs and generally had an outpouring of happiness untouched by social or political taint. Well not quite. There was a very significant move that may have wide reaching implications and consequences. It happened in Islamabad, was highly visible but almost completely unpublicised probably for entirely justifiable reasons of security, and is unlikely have happened without the political paralysis the country is currently experiencing.

Senior Indian military officials and diplomats posted at the Indian High Commission attended the parade for the first time. The invitation was extended by the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Qamar Javed Bajwa, according to an unnamed source. The invitation was intended to send a message that Pakistan ‘stands for peace’ and comes at a time when there are almost unprecedented levels of tension between the two states. It is going to be interesting to see what level of reciprocity India extends.

The invitation — and its acceptance — is all the more significant because of its source. There is no politician of the ruling party that could have made the invitation and the diplomatic baton is however temporarily passed to a military hand. Moreover, there is going to be no political leader in place with the heft or capacity to extend anything to India beyond a platitudinous greeting much before the end of the year. The ruling PML-N is lumbering towards a dissolution and then a neutral interim government, an administrative necessity that is more than caretaker and less than fully-fledged administration. The reality is that the institution bridging the interregnum is the military in that it provides continuity and a guarantee of stability, uncomfortable as that may be for an emerging democracy working towards a second peaceful transition of power via a general election. The vacuum is of political making and the product of a desire to perpetuate power by whatever means — or usurp it — which leaves the grown-ups in charge of the kindergarten. Ball in your court, India.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2018.

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