Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The May 9, 2023 violent attacks against the armed forces installations in Pakistan, mainly in the dominant province of Punjab (the backbone of the Army) by the angry youthful followers of deposed prime minister (PM) Imran Khan in a frenzied reaction to his humiliating arrest are unprecedented in the history of a ‘garrison state’. Most provocative was the desecration and destruction of the memorials of the valiant heroes and martyrs of various wars with India. Even a politically ‘reluctant’ and moderate high brass of the armed forces could not take such defiance of its power and honour with patience.
Quite intriguing was the exceptional patience of the military high command in the face of such a violent provocation by not-so-big but furious crowds to perhaps avoid a bloody showdown with the enraged Punjabi youth. A massive crackdown followed, the likes of which we had seen only during military regimes, which has put the political future of its hand-made illiberal populist leader, former PM Imran Khan, in serious jeopardy. His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (Movement for Justice), couldn’t take this initial serious jolt and has crumbled like a house of cards. In just a matter of a few days, a flood of Mr Khan’s second- and middle-level leaders have been forced to leave, or for fear of retribution have considered it wiser to leave their charismatic leader at the mercy of circumstances. Now, it is an isolated Imran Khan who has blamed the May 9 mayhem on the ‘agencies’ and left his scattered cult followers waiting in hiding for his next call.
It seems that after running a ‘foreign conspiracy to dislodge him, with domestic facilitators’ narrative on his ouster through what was a constitutional in-house change, he has lost his wits after numerous political somersaults, amid a huge patriotic groundswell in favour of the army. The allies in the Shahbaz Sharif-led coalition government, reeling from mass disappointment over their government’s poor performance and hyper stagflation, found a great opportunity to capitalise on Imran Khan’s shenanigans and the adventurism of his amateur anarchist cult followers. The double gamble that Imran Khan played, first by wooing the army’s high command to resume its patronage and then threatening it to succumb to his pressure from within and with the added support of retired military personnel, finally backfired when he crossed the Rubicon.
The mass defections from the PTI remind one of the similar way innumerable electable politicians in their hoards were ‘persuaded’ to join Mr Khan’s popular bandwagon just before the 2018 elections. In Pakistan’s electoral history, except for the 1970 elections, the electoral rating of a leader or party is not enough. What makes it successful is the green signal of ‘acceptability’ from the GHQ and institutional ‘political engineering’ that ensures ‘positive results’ in elections. The elections in 1988, 1990 and 1996 were rigged against Benazir Bhutto, then Chairperson of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and in favour of former PM and president of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Nawaz Sharif, a protégé of military dictator General Ziaul Haq. In a Bhutto-antiBhutto political divide, the tussle between these two leaders allowed the military establishment ample room to play one against the other. The exception to this pattern in our political history was Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, who became the President of Bangladesh after the defeat of the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan. This sundering of the country allowed the political space for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to become the most powerful PM and declare Pakistan a democratic republic under the 1973 Constitution. But the saga of the brutal murder in a military coup of the founding father of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and the judicial murder of the most popular leader of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tells the tragic story of the fate of democracy in these two countries.
Imran Khan’s dramatic rise and treacherous fall from power is not an exceptional phenomenon, though it carries some very unique and conflicting traits. It is essentially a replay of the boom and bust of successive protégés of an all-pervasive military establishment that has continued to make and break hybrid regimes to suit its shortsighted and constitutionally flawed designs. As Nawaz Sharif, despite being groomed and built up as a conservative (Punjabi) alternative to the liberal progressive Bhuttos, grew to become a leader in his own right, he was sacked thrice for asserting his prime ministerial prerogatives. Similarly, when a most ‘Ladla’ (favoured) Imran Khan, pampered by former COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa and former DG ISI General Faiz Hameed, tried to trespass onto the ‘prohibited areas’ of the appointments of the next army chief and DG ISI, he got his fingers burnt. Sensing Mr Khan’s future authoritarian designs, the opposition parties allied in the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) promptly brought a vote of no-confidence against him. As his allies left his coalition on the wink and a nudge of the Generals to support the PDM, this ‘democratic alliance’, after coming to power, conveniently forgot the 26-point agenda of reversing civil-military relations and establishing civilian supremacy.
A rowdy blame game and conflict between the ‘creator’ and the ‘creature’ testifies to the crisis of the prevalent hybrid system brokered by the Army. As the personality cult built around the persona of the Great Khan comes to haunt its manufacturers, its deconstruction is causing greater trouble than could have been anticipated. When populism seeps into the mass psychology and engenders fascism, it is difficult to unravel it without demolishing all those traits of a cult that are eulogised by the masses. Compared to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s radical populism mixed with authoritarian tendencies, Imran Khan’s illiberal populist appeal combines quite diverse facets and instinctive fascinations among various age groups of men and women. He remains a cricket hero to a wider club of cricket fans, among upper-class middle and old-aged women in particular. He can also boast of the glamorous masculine appeal of a celebrity among a vast section of young men and women. In essence, he reflects the personality of a financially Puritan philanthropist with a misogynist and religiously righteous appeal among the middle classes who adhere to a meta-narrative that is pro-army and anti-politicians.
Like Anna Hazare’s Bhrashtachar Virodh Jan Andolan in 1991 in India, Mr Khan after struggling in the wilderness for over a decade launched his ‘Justice’ movement against the corruption of the parties of the old regime in his first big rally at Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore in 2011. He was backed by no less than successive DGs of ISI from General Gul Hameed, a pro-Taliban jihadi hawk, through General Pasha to General Faiz, the last named perhaps the ultimate Machiavellian. Imran Khan’s famous dharna (sit-in) against the third Nawaz Sharif government in 2014 was also backed by the then DG ISI General Zahirul Islam Abbasi and the then COAS General Raheel Sharif, the latter aspiring to an extension in his tenure. All parties across the aisles in parliament united and foiled Imran Khan’s attempted street coup. Later, the superior judiciary sympathetic to Mr Khan disposed of PM Nawaz Sharif and dubiously disqualified him from holding any public office on a flimsy charge for all times to come, thus paving the way for the PTI chief.
As PM for over three and a half years, Imran Khan enjoyed being on the ‘same page’ with the Army leadership until he tried to outsmart his benefactors, who got extremely disenchanted with his clueless poor governance. Surrounded by sycophants and fortune-seekers, the Kaptan (Captain) not only failed to deliver on any promise except ‘fixing’ his opponents and the media, he did not let any leader emerge in the provinces he governed nor allowed a worthwhile team to flourish. Now he is left with a disorganised mass of chaotic youth without any ideology and any measure of organisation at any level. Unlike the Bhuttos and the Sharifs, who stood the pressure and hostility of the establishment for long and survived, Mr Khan’s political fortunes are under a dark cloud. His party may not and should not be banned, nor his followers tried by military courts. The human rights bodies and the liberals, whom Imran Khan has always been castigating, are yet again coming forward to defend the civil, political and human rights of his party and activists.
What makes the current political imbroglio more pervasive is an all-out crisis of the political economy and the unsustainability of a heavy ‘national security state’ on the basis of a dependent and fragile economic base overburdened with debt and defence expenditure and rent-seeking elites. The current crisis is further fueled by the intra-state conflicts among various power structures and state institutions vying for retaining their fiefdoms or expanding their respective space beyond their ‘constitutional mandate’, which in any case is not adhered to by any pillar of the state. The post-Bajwa military under COAS General Asim Munir had vowed to keep aloof from politics, but Imran Khan forced its hand. The May 9 ‘mutiny’ has drawn a red line that will have its own adverse consequences for a fragile democratic transition. From the fall of the hybrid regime of Imran Khan, Pakistan may be moving toward yet another edition of a quasi-democratic dispensation or worse, a civilian martial law.
The writer is a freelance journalist and Secretary General of SAFMA. He can be reached at Imtiaz.safma@gmail.com