Burning the house down

Aloudly touted script by a leading journalist is in the news for charting a way to bring Imran Khan and his government down, as indeed force the military — assumed IK backer — to succumb to the pressure of emplaced dysfunction and paralysis and relent from supporting him further. It suggests that parliament should not be permitted to function through planted resignations which when filled with replacements through by-elections should again resign and impose a continuous paralysis of perpetual institutional dysfunction.

Without a functional parliament the country and its economy will lose any credibility and come to a halt. The script then poses the choice, essentially on the military: if you persist with Imran Khan and the PTI in government you will not have a functional political system nor an economy, only turmoil, chaos and anarchy (engineered); else dump the present government and its leadership through so many of the different ways that the army is known to have employed in the past to sack leaders and dismiss governments. Paradoxical? Indeed. In simple English it is called ‘Blackmail’. Burning the house down, holding a knife to the throat or a gun to the head all count as blackmail. No one advocates such recourse against one’s own country, nation and its people. You got to be blinded by something intense to wish such wretched adversity. Politics is meant to find ways not close avenues. It opens doors, not shut windows. It is the art of the possible and if you do the impossible you rise to being a statesperson.

The journalist lists two telling terms in fulfillment of the objective of displacing an elected government. One, “create a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ for the sitting government” and force the hand of those that continue to prop this government (my words and his intent) to drop their support of the sitting government. A ‘dubious’ government will soon be delegitimised and isolated from the global system. It will lose its credibility and its trust with possible partners in the global system. It will mar not only the economy but nation’s foreign relations where the allies too will be loath to accost such a regime, China including. And that will pay put to CPEC extracting an unbearable cost on a chance to recover from a stalled economy further stagnated because of Covid. Along with augmenting the pain in supporting this government it also help manifest this government’s incompetence threatening a wider collapse. A paralysis of the political, social and economic order will only help reinforce the perception of this government’s incompetence. The recipe is intended to either cause a meltdown or a fear of a meltdown which will force a new play, or bust. The ultimate aim is to actualise the end of Imran Khan.

There is an unstated but equally suicidal objective concealed in this make-up which essentially emerges from stigmatising the military to force it to pull back from its role at the national level. That to some will then open the space for the more traditional political forces to vie for arresting power back from an outsider (IK) to the established political players (PML-N and PPP). To that end the military will need to be pressured enough over issues sensitive to it. Implied in the argument is a suggestion that military is risking its popularity and increasingly being disparaged in places such as Punjab — military’s traditional stronghold. It may seem an exaggeration but when used in conjunction with imposing a functional paralysis may just force the military to rethink its position, per the script. If that also means denting the image and respect of the military, it serves an intended purpose.

One other aspersion among many is on the hybrid nature of this order. The apparent cooperation on most matters between the government and the military is being called out for being non-democratic as if everything else undertaken by any order is democratic — democracy is too narrowly defined to suit the genius of our political system. This line of argument delegitimises Imran Khan and vilifies the military for being assertive ‘beyond their domain’. Incompetence of the incumbents finds the critics the space to seem credible regardless of the self-serving nature of the argument but it is patently unfair to deride political or democratic credentials of PTI for its lack of performance in government. The party has strengths which it must build on even as it needs to learn its lessons from why it may have squandered a precious opportunity to redefine the political culture in Pakistan away from its tribal, parochial and elitist nature.

Facts speak differently. It is for the first time in the last two decades that a third party has found its way to power in what had become a two-party system effectively. Insufficient accountability and tainted tenures have meant that the trust and credibility of the two mainstream parties had been badly dented with the people at large. The PTI thus found an unlikely entry. A lot of it also had to do with energising the usually dormant voter base which had always kept itself above the political fray as indeed some very successful populist campaigning that the party is now finding difficult to follow through with when in power. The two largest parties of the 2018 elections, PTI and PML-N, won around 17 and 12 million votes respectively. This wasn’t all manipulated vote, if at all. Whether this repeats itself depends on if people’s romance with PTI has worn out.

Looking back at this week’s proceedings in the parliament the act of disruption and engineered chaos is already in play. PDM announced at its meeting in the week that this non-cooperation will continue in the parliament. Chaos now has bona fide ownership. Alongside the opposition continues to trash and reject all that the government proposes to do. It is PDM’s (combined opposition) plan next to convert this non-cooperation and parliamentary disruption into physical anarchy. The PDM hopes it will generate enough interest in the people to add some mass and momentum to PDM’s movement through a ‘long march’. Till date the masses seem to have shrugged this skullduggery for lack of any serious effort on the part of these players to redeem their plight. To most it remains an impetuous lust for power. Still, the march may just generate sufficient pressure on the army to remove Imran Khan, PDM hopes.

Freedom of association and expression underpin a political system. To deny it to others and only restrict it to traditional political families and dynasties remains as self-defeating as it is fundamentally flawed. To discount PTI as a genuine political force in the country countermines the larger purpose sought in civilian supremacy, political freedom and democratic pursuit. A genuine political culture isn’t also built around undermining political, economic and social stability in the country. Subversion of national cohesion and engineered anarchy is not the way to win power back. It remains patently insidious. IK is unlikely to submit but others too will need to see through such Machiavellian undertakings.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2021.

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