When demons hold you back

Lack of political stability over the last seven and a half decades counts as persistent demon

There are demons that possess the long memory and then there are the recent ones, more alive and scarier, that can ruin the mind and dictate an urgency. We as a nation hold both close in our painful journey. Lack of political stability over the last seven and a half decades counts as the persistent demon which is now an accompaniment and a reality which the sub-conscious has learnt to deal with. We negotiate, we bargain, we carve spaces in give and take, and then we coexist. The long memory demons remain our perpetual companions. The short memory ones make us fearful with caution and hold us back.

Consider: which are the three recent demons that have affected us most as a nation and under whose impact we have literally reeled under? The Vote of No Confidence (VNC) was unique. We have dismissed governments in express decisions or because of military takeovers but never removed a government with a high-stakes real-life parliamentary and political drama. It may have been externally directed but the way political players executed their roles was picture-perfect. The experience left a few scars and then delivered to us a 13-party government for sixteen months which rendered the last rites of social turmoil, rapid economic slide, and patent political bankruptcy. A VNC did not lead to early or instant elections as the wont would be by any measure of political and democratic ethos, instead PDM decided to sit over the ruins of what was to degrade at a rate incomprehensible by any level of incompetence but abjectly served its tribal and personal interests.

The consequence was imminent default. One had already occurred in the neighbourhood, in Sri Lanka. Ours was only moments away. Despite the ignominy of inept governance under a weak and ineffectual leadership over the years we had rarely faced the possibility of such dishonour before. We had lost wars, lost half the country but had never felt the probability of a humiliation of this scale. This would have been devastating with debilitating consequences to the national psyche. PDM’s answer to the problem was their go-to man, Ishaq Dar, who unfortunately complicated matters even more. The din only got louder with suspicion that Dar and the PDM were preying on the fears of an anxious nation by deliberately delaying going to the IMF to seek reprieve. It seemed a debasing intent to keep relevant to the establishment who was overly consumed by the possibility of another humiliation following the political vacuum that had been engendered by an allegedly triggered VNC. Both the PDM and its ineptitude, and the threat of default have shaken the core of this nation. What followed since was utter debasement. The feeling it left was the need to build back brick by brick.

In between was that amateurish attempt by a political party to upstage an order through disruptive and violent agitation targeted against the country’s armed forces. Whatever and whoever guided the genius of such absurdity did graver harm than any other to give us a tenuous and fretful political environment. We are barely taking baby-steps to walk out of that morass too. That it has taken on an even greater complexity adds to the entanglement of the context. Rather than resolve and seek redress of the situation created by this party it takes greater pride in holding to the warpath. Not the politics of accommodation but of confrontation guides their cadres. Zero-sum gain is their mantra. A country of 250 million can barely survive such nihilistic recourse. Correction and remedies are needed on all sides to learn to coexist and shed imprudent options that can only perpetuate the predicament.

Any order, hybrid or not, when weighed in by these demons has constant fear guiding perceptions and resort. It holds economy and not politics the key to resolving our predicaments. That may be right and there are enough examples of how nations (China) have achieved progress under non-representative systems. But what we miss in this generality is the continuity of a system — democratic or non-democratic — which is the key to a stabler environment engendering greater economic confidence, rather than the type of continuum. The puritans might cringe, but finance and investment understand nothing better than predictability and assurance of return. It is usual to link growth under martial law to generous external funding in aid and investment but miss the comfort of predictability that these regimes invoked under those geopolitical conditions. The more relevant question is: can we make a normally run democracy under civilian dispensation provide that continuum and predictability to enthuse economic engagement? If so a resort to quasi or contrived civilian set-ups may not be necessary.

The current order in the country, though interim, is serving beyond constitutional limits and domain. Yet, it was under legislative empowerment of the last assembly that this set-up was authorised to indulge in areas of economy and reforms. Now that a composite format of the SIFC is on the verge of targeted economic restructuring through external financing there is a need of credibility, trust, continuity and predictability for the financing to materialise at a time when Pakistani economy is in desperate need of such assistance. That infuses a dilemma of choice in options, going forward. Will the succeeding government order be the predictable partner in this need of desperate national restoration?

The safest bet could be to keep the incumbent order in place. Except that in the short run it might seem efficacious but is sure to raise complex constitutional and legal issues as it extends further into the future. Political parties will succumb to agitation and disruption in the name of regaining democratic rights triggering another crisis. The second option is to conduct the elections as per given cycle and schedule but form a national unity government of all parties represented in the national assembly with a single mission to restore economic viability, execute difficult taxation and restructuring measures, and take common responsibility for sanitising legislative lacunae in the constitution in quasi-democratic structure. With a sunset clause of three years to get the house in order, the assembly should act as the ‘committee of the whole’. Rules will need to be changed and business enacted quite in line with how the Senate has already exemplified. This can be the closest to a democratic succession to an order necessitated by the obtaining conditions in the country.

A free and fair election in these conditions is unlikely to be so perceived by the wider electorate hence any outcome will be heavily qualified. This only leaves space for a composite, even if representative, outcome to continue the path to incremental restoration of essential elements of governance, economy and to engender hope. It will also help move politics out of the detent it is currently stuck in, and still be a better option than persisting with a limping non-democratic order.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2023.

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