Democracy! Shape of things to come

As I sit down to write I find no indications that this government is in any mood to give a call for early elections. However, by the time this goes to print, Imran Khan may have already announced his date of march to Islamabad. If this happens it will be very tragic. History tells us that only when a group looks into the future and sees no hope for justice and sees nothing but additional pain that it resorts to protests and violence as its only path to progress. Personally, I think we should never lay the blame for the chaos and crisis that results on this group but on those set of rulers who through their indecisiveness let the opportunity of reconciliation pass by and allow the creation of much more difficult circumstances. People are fundamentally hopeful; it is the nature of the human struggle to believe that life no matter how bad eventually gets better with effort and struggle. But it is always up to the rulers to ensure people struggle within a just system rather than creating a system that is unjust which persuades and induces the people to stand up against it and even forces them to pull it down and burn it.

People’s governments always step in to help but when governments take out batons, they treat protesting people not as their own people and the resultant government brutality only escalates violence.

Protests are about hope and are an act of optimism because people believe that by increasing the pressure through protests the system will correct itself. Good governments never treat protests with disdain and never see them through the barrel of a gun and batons in hand because protests are people’s effort to fix the system and if protests take the shape of a last-ditch attempt which in our case is a people’s march to Islamabad then the government must know that it has already miscalculated and has minimised the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the issue.

Nothing radicalises people more than the unleashing of the law enforcement agencies on the people by a weak and autocratic government. Democratic governments always yield to protests to avoid violence but kleptocracies would avoid compromise and go for harsh responses and would be willing to play hardball because they would like to stay on in the government as it is in their nature of being to scavenge even the last remains of the state carcass because of their unrestrained access to the state’s coffers.

Pakistan is going through a treacherous political period and the people are concerned not only about their own personal and financial safety and security but also about their country. Therefore, putting the country at higher risks of political instability, increased violence, and ultimately a civil war-like situation is not a good decision. Those who studied Iraq’s civil war sought an answer to a fundamental question: What changed in Iraq before the civil war broke out?’ The popular answer to this question by the people of Iraq was that Iraqi people increasingly started asking: are you Sunni or Shia? Iraq got divided and public opinion got polarised on religious lines and many actors both internal as well as external played a huge hand in taking sides and arming private militias that took the violence and fight directly to the people. Americans who thought that they were in Iraq to provide relief to the Iraqi people and were in fact welcomed when they initially militarily intervened ended up delivering the perfect conditions for a new monster to raise its head that we all know by the name of ISIS. Pakistan too like Iraq today showcases a deeply divided and polarised society. But gladly this polarisation is political and social and not religious. To bring the society and state in balance, instead of resorting to violence against the protesting people the government must hold elections and allow the electorate to give this crucial judgment: who should rule the people of Pakistan?

There are two bays in the Indian Ocean and Pakistan is located at the mouth of one bay while at the mouth of the other bay is located the country of Myanmar. To the readers, I would like to quote an example of this country. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won the 2020 Myanmar general elections. But in February 2021 she was arrested following a coup that returned the Armed Forces to power. Last month she was sentenced to five years in prison on corruption charges. Her arrest, trial and sentence have been condemned by the US and the UN as politically motivated. But it is not her arrest, trial and sentence that I want to highlight; what I want to highlight is what she failed to do ahead of the government when she had her opportunity.

Social media has played a massive role in bringing her government down. Distractors of all governments have now social media as the new powerful tool at their disposal and it is remarkably good at generating public anger and resentment. An estimated 24,000 Rohingya people have been killed in ethnic violence and some 700,000 have been forced to flee. This was one of the largest human exoduses in Asia and the world looked up to the Nobel Peace Prize winner who had championed democracy all her life to manage a solution. Her response was alarming; she failed to acknowledge the scale of violence and even claimed that pictures showing the fleeing Rohingya on social media were fake. The Rohingya situation she claimed was the result of a huge iceberg of misinformation. There is no doubt that thousands of fake accounts blamed the Rohingyas for violence and crimes but the response of San Suu to the Rohingya genocide was not suggestive of a Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader. Was she too afraid of taking a position different from that of her Armed Forces? Or was she trying to hold on and stay in power? Either way, she disappointed all those who saw in her a leader who stood up and unflinchingly supported and promoted democracy. My request to our democratic leaders is to understand and support the will of our people. You don’t need them to gather in Islamabad to witness it – it is right there today for everyone to see. Closing your eyes to reality, calling it fake and a product of disinformation will make you another Aung San Suu Kyi.

It is not just the similarity in strategically important geographic locations in the Indian Ocean that both Myanmar and Pakistan enjoy; the similarity is also there in how militaries in both countries have ruled for decades. But since 2008 Pakistan has been gradually experiencing a transition to civilian rule and unlike Myanmar, there is a lot of hope that the civilian leaders will build on this still infant democratic character of the state. To do this, I feel calling for early elections is the only right bet.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 22^nd, 2022.

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