It ain’t over till it’s over

A government on proxies was displaced when they changed places. This one is a coalition of eleven parties, each a minority in the House. The previous one too was a minority government – stitched together to cobble a majority. I started shouting for it to go for snap or early polls – early enough in their tenure – to establish its authenticity with a majority win but so sure was it about the stitch that it ambled along callously and disdainfully anyway. Uninitiated into the art of governance or policy-making it erred from one event into another and became too big and brash. Arrogance was a default recourse just as when a batsman is at sea and gets beaten repeatedly by a wily bowler and all he can offer is a silly smirk to somehow hold his reputation in place. That is when they look fools. But what do you do when you turn looking foolish into an art form? Or simply refuse to accept when outdone by the challenge thrown at you?

That’s all in the past even though the PTI continues to defy wisdom and make fool of all the people all the time with contrived tales and a narrative of emotive jingoism as its top tool for face-saving. What and how might it play out is all in the future – perhaps not too far ahead because it is in the nature of tenuous coalitions to wobble and fragment at the first stumbling block. Constitution is part letter and pails full of spirit. Which really means that the written word may be incomplete, inadequate or incomprehensible in a given situation and can only do with a cooperative reiteration of all its players to fill the blanks. When that too falls short the Courts fill in which is rather unsavory and quite pleasantly balked at by sending such issues back to the Parliament to resolve within by practitioners of politics. It though needs the will and the commitment of the democratic and political system to find an answer and resolve a legal lacunae. That is huge amount of spirit and sincerity to make the system work and succeed. When the letter exists but the spirit is absent even the best worded statute can be despoiled. That is when a system will short-circuit into a suspension. Nations run with continuity and predictability which needs huge amount of goodwill for it to keep it going. As we found out short-circuiting a system is as easy as it is to keep it running.

But what do you do if a party thinks otherwise whether it is to win power, hold power, usurp power, cheat its way into power, or simply deny power. When power rather than its use and execution of the responsibility which comes with it is the aim the entire system is corrupted till it is corrupted to the chore. When that happens the contract between the nation and the state and the one between the state and the government and between the government and its people all get blown into smithereens. That is when chaos, anarchy, confusion, lack of clarity, uncertainty and unpredictability take hold and that is when the society and the economy lose faith and both the nation and the state are rendered weak and vulnerable. We have been one such state now for the last few weeks and it ain’t over yet.

How to get out of this hole? The PTI tried all ways to hold onto power and when it realised it couldn’t, it brought the house down while thwarting every attempt to keep it standing. In the new order even with emergent scaffolding it still is a wobbly house given to collapsing with the slightest tremble. However when you heard the new PM speak it seemed like an agenda for a full term. That isn’t of course possible; at best the assemblies can only go on till August 17, 2023. So something isn’t right in all of this. Either the new PM is too ambitious for his statesmanship to show or has simply no idea how to match goals to means. He needs to tailor his objectives to the available time and work assiduously towards those ends. That alone will institute some predictability and stability away from the chaos and confusion that seemed to have enveloped this nation. Certainty will be long time coming. How it might look is still moot but we will do well if we can revert to simply being normal.

Shehbaz’s first order of the day will be to somehow keep this motley collective together. There is little to gain or give in the remaining time of this Parliament so other than perks there is little else that the partners will benefit from. If the government runs for another year and five months the economy may only get worse with a disruption caused by this change of government and Shehbaz, Miftah and Co will only add brickbats against their names. This will pave the way for the new team headed by the immortal Mian Nawaz Sharif and his finance Guru, the forever Issac Daar, to make another entry validating them as the most deserving alternatives. I don’t want to be cynical at the worst of times for our nation but there is great wisdom in the Iranian saying that it is better to avoid being a younger brother. Electoral reforms, all want, and that might be the only viable outcome of this regular but interim set-up. That those will be controversial is no gainsaying.

The real show will go on, on the roads. IK and his cohorts are taking it to all corners of the country. And, why not? It is a bona fide political move to mobilise people for a political purpose. He wants early elections and he just might get them – though not as early as he may want. (We all can now read between lines). If he were rational and sensible he would at all times be going over why he failed? Not by an external conspiracy as he has most successfully sold to his absolutely doting followers but because of organic and personal weaknesses. He will need to overcome those if he wants to succeed the next time. He will need a politically savvy team who can work the chambers, not in a political war but for moving the wheel of parliamentary democracy forward. He will need to learn to control his impulses and pale his ambition before common good. Four elements of our state system our quite unique to statecraft: parliament, bureaucracy, judiciary and the military. These cannot be rubbished if a government indeed needs to function smoothly. These remain the permanent anchors of the state and will, one way or another, intervene if a political system becomes dysfunctional or paralysed. Democratic or not, this is how we are structured.

It is tragic when a whole village comes together to bring one man down. I feel and know the pain. But better men have a decision to make: do they take the whole house down with them, or live to fight another day? Or fade into the distant setting sun. Character in adversity helps make the right choice.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 15^th, 2022.

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