The Foundational Error

A THOUGHT MATURES into an idea. The idea gains traction, and seeks objectives through elections. Elections throw up a parliament split by competing, unbridged ethnic aspirations. The polity is desta­bilised by demographics; viable government becomes impos­sible as groups seek autonomy through separate geographies. An economic meltdown traps the country in a virulent eco­political crisis. Can such a crisis split the nation?

It did, in 1971, when Pakistan broke into two.

Fifty years later, a similar toxic fever burns across the “land of the pure”. If Pakistan is not on the verge of a third partition of the Indian subcontinent since 1947, it is only because the country’s formidable armed forces are unlikely to repeat their barbaric mistakes of 1970 and 1971, when they compounded abortion of an electoral mandate with ruthless massacres of Bengalis who demanded nothing more than the right to live as equals within their own linguistic-cultural space.

The Pakistan elections of 2024 have delivered something more volatile than a fractured arithmetic in a disjointed National Assembly. Paradoxical as it may sound, the threat to Pakistan’s unity lies in the stability of regional loyalties. Pakistan is turning into three or perhaps four political states under one flag.

The tension is least between the Pashtun Khyber Pakh­tunkhwa on the Afghan frontier and adjoining Punjab, but hardly absent. The friction between Punjab and Sindh, straddling Jacobabad in the north, Umarkot in the east, and Karachi in the south, is far more visceral. Arid and underdeveloped Balochistan, stretching from Quetta beside the Afghan mountains to Gwadar on the Indian Ocean, has been venting its anger through sporadic insurrection since the 1960s.

Karachi, capital of Sindh, is not quite Sindhi. It is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual city state dominated by the Muhajir, or Urdu-speaking refugees who left Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Hyderabad in search of El Dorado. Karachi voted for the Mut­tahida Qaumi Movement (Pakistan), or MQM-P, which won 17 National Assembly seats purely on the basis of a consolidated refugee mandate. After 75 years, those who abandoned India still do not trust any indigenous Pakistani political party. They feel as distant from Sindhis as Punjabis. That says what it says. Logically, these are the only seats MQM-P won.

Clarification: Many political parties in Pakistan (PML-N, or Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz); PML-Q; et al) have an initial in parenthesis because an amoeba is their preferred role model. They keep splitting from within.

Sindhis identified with their Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by the Bhutto clan from Larkana (renamed Shaheed Benazi­rabad). PPP was established as a pan-national party by Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The patriarch was hanged by the Paki­stan army on April 4, 1979 at the age of just 51 in a case tantamount to judicial murder. Benazir was assassinated on December 27, 2007 while campaigning in Rawalpindi. She was 54. No political assassin is ever found in Pakistan. Father and daughter made the fatal mistake of defying the armed forces. After Benazir, PPP has shrunk to a Sindhi party, but that is also its source of strength in the current environment. This year, PPP took 44 seats in Sindh, with MQM winning the other 17. No one else got a look-in.

The political dots do not connect across the country.

The Election Commission of Pakistan must be the most polite electoral overseer in the world. It does not put a zero on the results scoreboard when a party gets nothing. It says, more courteously, “No data to display”. There was no data to display against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan’s party, in Sindh. The Imran wave, buoyant among Pathans and Punjabis, withered to a trickle south of Punjab. Imran Khan flopped even in urban Karachi. Bilawal Bhutto’s comprehensive defeat in Lahore proved the same point, as did his comfortable victories from two constituencies in Sindh.

Pathan Imran Khan and Punjabi Nawaz Sharif shared Punjab’s 141 National Assembly constituencies, with 67 and 55 seats. The rest went to splinter ornamentals. The pattern held in the prov­inces. PPP got 84 seats and MQM 28 in the Sind legislature, while Imran swept the Pathan frontier. Pakistan has become endemi­cally parochial.

How valid is Imran Khan’s claim that he was robbed of a great majority because his candidates were forced to stand as indepen­dents, and were denied his symbol, a cricket bat? The wail of his supporters filled the air on counting day but has ebbed a bit. But the very fact that his independents were elected in substantial numbers, with 93 in the National Assembly, means that voters knew what they were doing. Khan’s next challenge will be the loyalty of his flock. Many will be lured by the promise of soft office or the persuasion of hard cash. Or both.

Imran Khan could not rise above the limitations of his personal­ity. It is a remarkable, if unremarked, fact that while he has always been strident about problems, he has never offered a cogent solu­tion. During his years as prime minister he frittered away substan­tial public goodwill and cantonment support. The economy tanked on his watch. All leaders are not blessed with intellectual heft but they need to find talent to fill the gap. Lahore society, which dines on acid, once nicknamed Imran Khan ‘Im the Dim’. As prime minister he challenged the caricature but could not destroy it. His unique asset remains sincerity. He means well, and that resonates. He also believes that he is a man of destiny, which is another story.

Every democracy is bitter with the rancour of ambition. Lead­ers exhaust themselves, and their vituperative vocabulary, to win power. The 2024 Pakistan elections will be remembered as one in which leaders fought to stay out of power, after the results came in.

The Sharifs and the Bhuttos have turned the “Pehley aap (You first)” etiquette into a strained joke. Nawaz Sharif, who returned from exile in London to inspire a grand personal and national resurrection, has stepped aside for his brother Shehbaz to become prime minister. He is still hoping to be promoted to saviour when history summons. Bilawal Bhutto, who started this round of pow­er games by seeking the top mantle for himself, told a press con­ference on February 14 that his party much preferred a backseat, offering merely to provide fuel for a Sharif government. His gas station will run dry when he chooses to cut off supplies. The gas is not free. His father Asif Ali Zardari will become president. That is a ceremonial position, until it is not ceremonial: a president takes the final call on the life and death of a government. Zardari has the skills of a good puppeteer.

Pakistan is getting a Humpty Dumpty government. You can put the egg on the wall but you cannot prevent its fall. Shehbaz Sharif will lead a candle-and-a-half administration. It will be lucky to celebrate its second birthday.

Pakistan’s next finance minister is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is providing the debt that sustains governance.

The IMF might even become the country’s finance minister for the foreseeable future. The IMF is not interested in votes. When its medicine gets bitter, it laughs all the way to the hospital. Politicians cannot afford to be so blasé. They understand the danger. A prime minister who starts as a hero becomes a demon when rising prices and deprivation drive people to a rage, and streets begin to boil.

HE POWER BALANCE is poised on a fragile axis. Sharif, Zardari and Khan constitute a lopsided triangle. A love triangle is dangerous; a power triangle is venomous. All three are high-stakes gamblers in the no-limits casino of Pakistan politics. All three know that the croupier-owner is the army. All three have been allies and victims of the men in uniform. Imran Khan may sound moral and mordant now, but a little intro­spection will help him recall that he limped into office on the crutch of the army. That’s how the game is played, with the referee holding a volatile gun rather than a starting pistol. All three, in their seventies or almost there, know that this is their last throw of dice. After this, the deluge, in which the next generation can sink or swim.

For the moment, Asif Zardari has made the best of a shaky bargain. A president is perfect positioning for anyone seeking a place in power without a trace of responsibility. Zardari can keep a beady eye on his family interests, while holding a sword over Sharif’s head. Sentiment is not Zardari’s forte. He will know when to wield his weapon.

Bilawal Bhutto has already initiated the parallel narrative, claiming that if anyone can put out the fire raging through Paki­stan it is his father. So that’s the Bhutto formula for this alliance: heads I win, tails you lose.

Bilawal’s grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the last leader in Pakistan with an economic programme. Bhutto might not have suggested more than a panacea for the problems of roti, kapda and makaan but the very fact that he raised the slogan impressed the people who had witnessed nothing but the elitism of a class that usurped power in Pakistan from inception.

Pakistan has been run by an alliance of lawyers, landlords and businessmen since 1947. This coalition fed the people with emo­tional, religious populism while fattening itself. For more than seven decades, it has ferreted its wealth to safe havens abroad. Every Pakistani above a reasonable pay-grade has a foreign bank account. The law is irrelevant. The police cannot be punitive since their seniors have bank accounts too, through relatives or cut-outs. Between continuous political upheaval and economic distress, the people have become neurotic and a bit broken. They love their nation. They do not want to lose faith in their country even if they know that they have been betrayed by their leaders. But patriotism does not buy bread.

Politicians, including those in uniform, seek power not to solve national problems but to pursue their individual or institutional interests, save their skins and, if they can, lynch their opponents. No one has a cogent programme for economic revival. If Pakistan grows, it is in spite of its masters. While most nations seek a better future, Pakistan looks back to some romantic illusion cresting on Partition.

The existential threat facing Pakistan is the weakness of its foundational theory. Pakistan was built on quicksand, the idea that religion was sufficient as the basis for nationalism. No one thought this through because what worked in the maelstrom of 1947 was emotion, and emotion is intrinsically anti-intellectual. A little consideration would have led Muslim League theorists to the Quran itself, where Islam is described as a brotherhood, not a nationhood. Indeed, if Islam had been sufficient for nationalism, why would there be over 20 Arab nations? They have not only religion in common but also language, a far more adhesive glue for a nation-state.

Pakistan was conceived in the dubious embryo of an antith­esis, not a thesis. An elite decided, without the evidence of history or culture, that it could not live with the other. It forgot to ask if it could live with itself.

It could not.

Pakistan’s rulers quickly recognised the fragility of the theory that had given them a state. In November 1954, the fleeting gov­ernor general (Pakistan was still a Dominion without a consti­tution) Iskandar Mirza announced the merger of all provinces of West Pakistan into “One Unit”. This was meant to dampen regional ambitions in the west as well as pro­vide a counterbalance to East Bengal, where Bengalis refused to accept Urdu as their na­tional language. In October 1955, East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan. Suffice to say that this hopeless tinkering failed so abjectly it destroyed the country. “One Unit” was abandoned in July 1970 as Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans, and the Baloch wanted their own ter­ritory. By this time, the east was lost.

Pakistan’s Bengali majority dismissed the birth concept as false and iniquitous. The star­tled and befuddled West Pakistani rulers chose to hide behind a silly alibi, claiming that Bengalis were not Islamic enough. Since its liberation in 1971, Bangladesh has proved that it can be a successful nation without compromising on its faith. Bengalis do not need preachers from Punjab for lessons in Islam.

Sindh’s antagonism sharpened with Bhutto’s death. The des­pot General Zia-ul-Haq crushed the Sindhi upsurge in the 1980s. The anger abated only when Benazir Bhutto won the elections af­ter Zia-ul-Haq’s sudden and still inexplicable death in an air crash.

The Pakistan of 1947 self-destructed in its first 30 years. The Pakistan of 1971 has lost its way in the next 50. Instability is en­demic, triggered by centripetal and centrifugal pressures. Democ­racy now seems weary and incapable, leaving the genetically anti-democratic army as the only institution capable of ensuring a modicum of authority.

Is pseudo-democracy better for Pakistan than democracy? The unelected Pakistan army is a de facto presence in the politi­cal process. It has just congratulated itself through a public state­ment on the conduct of the 2024 elections. No democracy needs a certificate from its armed forces.

Thus far, the price of civilian failure has been army rule. Gener­als have used the “national interest” ploy to usurp decades of Paki­stan’s history. Will the army be tempted again? The possibility of chaos is always imminent. So when do the patriots march in? The nation can­not be allowed to go to the dogs, etc. (The British went in 1947 but left their clichés behind.)

In 1775, the British raconteur-lexicogra­pher-commentator Samuel Johnson famously described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. Johnson was talking about his country’s politicians. What happens when the credibility of both the civilians and the gener­als crumbles? There are then no doctors left to deal with a country’s cancer.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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