Pakistan in 2020 needs hope and a healing touch

Pakistan enters the New Year with an interesting anomaly between its domestic divide as opposed to a “geopolitical breather”, which has given Pakistan strategic space. This gap is at odds with a domestic scenario dominated by a mindset still stuck in a “I win, you lose” election mode. Normal governance, thus, remains on the back burner.

Reinforcing the deepening political divide within the country shows the absence of the “rules of the game”, both within the political forces and the organs of state power.

Pakistan has got strategic space due to three fundamental factors. Our next door neighbour, India, under Modi, is bent on driving a divisive ideological agenda, aimed at the biggest transformation of the Indian state‘s diversity and pluralism into a bigoted Hindutva republic. This is the biggest crisis for India since Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975, but more serious, as it undermines the Indian state as conceived by Gandhi and Nehru.

Second, since President Trump linked his re-election with a peace deal in Afghanistan through the good offices of Pakistan, the usual American pressure on Pakistan is happily absent. President Trump is the first American president after Kennedy, who is not part of the American establishment and his foreign policy approach, therefore, does not fully represent the traditional hawkish views of the US military-industrial-complex. Hence, with India in crisis and Trump facing impeachment and re-election in 2020, Pakistan has greater room to manoeuvre in a geopolitical setting, where its alliance with China, and pursuit of CPEC, provide new regional opportunities.

Pakistan, therefore, has greater leverage and enhanced advantage in the current geopolitical context, and this opportunity is likely to last through 2020.

What is worrisome from the point of view of Pakistan’s national interests is not the external situation, but the domestic divide, which has deepened since the 2018 controversial elections. In fact, the last three years have been wasted raking up demons of the past, rather than pursuing the future. The year 2017 was spent on pulling down the Old Order; 2018 was devoted to pushing “change”; while 2019 ended with the realisation that “the more things change, the more they remain the same”. So the New Year has dawned with a huge question mark: will it be back to the “drawing-board”?

Pakistan’s political history shows that decisions by diktat have never been enduring but have rather been counter-productive and eventually reversed. The 1959 decision to ban “old politicians” by “legally” ousting them via EBDO ultimately created a vacuum which then became a catalyst for the 1969 explosion. The pent-up anger gave birth to a new kind of politics by destroying the old. In the process, Pakistan was partitioned through the domestic failure to fashion “new rules of the game”, which was exploited by external forces through direct military aggression.

The politically-motivated 1979 decision to hang Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, after a dubious and divided SC verdict, led to a decade-long stalemate that ended with General Zia’s demise in 1988 in a mysterious air crash. Ironically, the following elections restored rule to the daughter of the man who had been hung. In 2017, there was a “regime change” with the subsequent caesarian birth of “New Pakistan”, midwifed via the elections of 2018.

Entering a new decade, do we wait for another explosion like that of 1969 or an “accident” like 1988, or do we learn lessons and bridge the growing gap between the elite and the street?

Pakistan enters 2020 facing the biggest challenge of a dysfunctional political process, while the steel-frame of the Pakistani state is split down the middle. The main reason for this brewing crisis is that, unlike the past, there is the regime refusal to accept the election results, with the mandate of the opposition being delegitimised. New realities of a changing Pakistan make the challenge more complicated. Multiple power centres now shape opinions and policies, as decision making is no longer the sole prerogative of the traditional establishment, whether khaki or mufti. A fiercely independent superior judiciary, a vibrant media that still dares to speak truth to power and a dynamic civil society driven by the youth and women play their respective roles in the shaping of the national discourse.

In today’s Pakistan, no single party, person or institution alone can neither subjugate the other nor “go at it alone” in resolving the problems of Pakistan. Common problems require collective decisions for the greater good, rising above partisan considerations or personal interests. Reversing wrongs through a course correction, based on upholding the Constitution and strengthening the Parliament, is the way forward. Muzzling the media or the reversion to the politics of vendetta and victimisation are steps backward that never work.

Let’s learn from the countries that learnt from their mistakes and moved on after course correction. The US under Nixon did that with the historic opening to China. In 1972, when China and the US agreed on their rapprochement, Chairman Mao advised president Nixon that “Let us seize the moment, seize the hour and build a new relationship together”. In 1979, the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, did a bold course correction for China through “Reform and Opening Up”, making China the world’s second biggest economy today.

Entering the New Year, Pakistan’s power brokers too must “seize the moment” provided by this opportunity, eschew “political tribalism” and set our house in order by giving hope, harmony and a healing touch to the country. Pakistan has suffered much since 1979 from the geopolitically-driven, flawed policies of the past, from “strategic depth” to the “Culture of Kalashnikovs”, twin pillars of terrorism and extremism. Reverting in letter and spirit to the Constitution, which is the “grundnorm” of the State, by fashioning “rules of the game” for harmony and coexistence amongst institutions and the political forces, is the way forward. Otherwise, we will be stuck in political experimentation that we cannot afford and which, in any case, has run its course. Instead of repeating past mistakes, a fresh approach and new thinking should be the order of the day. The people of Pakistan deserve and demand better in the 21st century. As the Quaid-e-Azam said: “Let it not be said that the leadership of Pakistan failed to rise to the occasion.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2020.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.