Respecting the will of the people

Ali Bilal alias Zille-e-Sha was killed under dubious circumstances as the police cracked down on PTI protestors in Lahore few days back. The young man didn’t deserve to die. He died standing on the side of the constitution, as like any citizen of Pakistan he had surrendered his freedom and rights to the state through an unsigned social contract that in return demanded that the state defend his right to life, liberty and property. The state failed and he is dead now. He cannot be brought back to life but what can be brought back to life from death is the dead conscience of the state.

Our security forces are practitioners of the art of safeguarding and protecting our lives yet since the arrival of the new government in Islamabad these practitioners are committing mistake after mistake and seem to have lost mastery over their well-practised art. The security bosses need to go back and get down to reading the fundaments to get their act straight. Theorists teach us those fundamentals and provide us valuable insights to stretch our imagination and if we correctly understand what they preach why would we err practising what they preach?

One such theorist was Car Von Clausewitz. He was a war theorist though, it may not be wrong to conceptualise the three elements of his ‘trinity theory’ in our current extremely unstable political environment. His three principal elements of the trinity theory are the government, military and the people. The government desires and military is utilised to fulfil that desire. Yet Clausewitz considers that no desire of the government can ever take the shape of reality until it is supported by the third element of the trinity, the popular will of the people. Any political or military strategy prepared and executed against the will and aspirations of the people is bound to fail. In fact, from the Clausewitzian trinity theory one can draw the definition of any political or military strategy — ‘the bridge between desire and possibility’. No instrument of power, even the mightiest of them all, the military will fail to construct the bridge between desire and possibility without the people’s will on board.

In the interest of our nation state, we must get our act straight. Allow political space to all the political parties to organise and run their political campaign. Stop wasting our time in trying to find reasons to postpone and delay elections. Allow people to exercise their right to vote and thus hold elections.

The story of Turkish President Erdogan’s rise to power is a story from which all three current powerful actors in Pakistani politics — the government, military and Imran Khan and his PTI — may take a lead. PM Necmettin Erbakan was Erdogan’s political mentor and when he was deposed in a military coup in 1997. Erdogan was also imprisoned and suspended from politics on charges of ‘religious incitement’. But the PM’s office could not be denied to Erdogan and he served as Turkish Prime Minister for 11 years — from 2003 to 2014. From 2014 onwards, he has been the President of Turkey. And since 2018, he has been serving as President under the executive system of Turkish government under which the President is directly elected by eligible Turkish voters for a five year term (which is ending this year) and which is renewable once. Unlike in Pakistan, and despite the devastating earthquake the Turkish President has committed that elections will go ahead on 14 May 2023.

Erdogan never felt safe from the long arm of the Turkish military and surrounded himself and even hid behind the people’s support. But as he consolidated his power, he showed no hesitancy in altering the balance of power with the military for good. Today, Erdogan is considered as an autocratic leader and many Turks blame him for eroding the secular credentials of the state, thus hollowing it from the inside. Given Imran Khan’s popularity, the Pakistani establishment may be suffering from a similar fear — the only way to address which is to overturn the will of the people. But in this lies a great danger of proliferation of political instability with the worst-case scenario of a civil war.

It may also be feared that Imran Khan, like Erdogan, may amend the constitution that may enshrine a presidential system of government and may interfere with the existing system and create a new system of checks and balances on the pretext of creating civilian dominance over the military.

Cleary PDM today is more confident about the military than PTI and this partisan gap is not good for the country. If the US President can indulge in the art of appeasing his generals (many US retired generals are appointed on the high-ranking posts in American administration) than this may equally not be considered as an exception in the Third World countries. But for army to become truly neutral such partisan appeasement of the military must be discontinued.

The state should be respected and loved and not feared. All government agencies should be rule-bound, transparent and accessible to people. Any government that believes in creating a modern Pakistan can also think about devising a mechanism and creating a hundred per cent reliable source through which only accurate information can be disseminated to the people. This would make the government secure, credible and reliable in the eyes of the people.

Our military and law enforcement agencies are our national treasure; they are a force multiplier that by acting as right practitioners can add to the soft image building of the country. How can anyone expect that they will go to war with the state and the very people they are under oath to protect and defend? We must respect theories and we must implement them in practice. Going against them will not prove the originating scholar of the theory but us wrong. Let’s respect the will and aspirations of the people. We must.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 12^th, 2023.

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