Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan will need a miracle to come clear of the conundrum he finds himself in.
In stark terms, he is battling for his political life and, as with everyone else in a similar situation in earlier times, he has been engaging in bravado in the face of the opposition challenge. He has been organizing giant rallies to demonstrate public support for himself and vowing that he will not quit.
The opposition certainly has grounds to build up a movement against his leadership of the country. Prices of essential goods have been climbing steadily and steeply; the pressure from the IMF remains pronounced; and Pakistan’s Arab allies, notably Saudi Arabia, do not appear too keen to bail the country out of the economic morass it is caught in today.
And besides, Khan’s ties with the West are not in good shape.
And then, of course, there is the question of governance -- or the lack of it. Since Khan and his party assumed power in 2018, a circumstance his political rivals have derided as being a matter of selection -- Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has ridiculed him as a selected, as opposed to elected, prime minister -- his government has not given any impression of being firmly in charge. But, of course, every government in Pakistan since the fall of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977 has been hamstrung by the overweening role of the country’s army.
While it is true that no army chief since Pervez Musharraf has gone for a coup d’etat, it is equally true that the military has continued to call the shots. Over the years, it has seen to it that governments led by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have exited -- not because of popular movements against them, but because, at one point, the soldiers wanted a change.
Effectively, therefore, the Pakistan army has remained, directly or indirectly, the agent of political change in the country.
Which, therefore, raises the question of whether the army has now decided that a fresh change is in order. An indication of such a probability comes through in the opposition’s increasingly strident calls for the departure of the Tehrik-e-Insaf administration. No political party in Pakistan, with the exception of the Pakistan People’s Party in the aftermath of the execution of ZA Bhutto, has ever marched against elected authority without the nod of the soldiers. Add to that the growing feeling that the army has so far stayed away from reassuring Imran Khan that he can continue to rely on it for support.
The Khan government therefore finds itself in a deep hole. Where governance is the issue, ministers have not exactly proven to be adept in running a smooth administration and, in the manner of their predecessors, have remained engaged in hit-and-run battles with the opposition. And then comes the question of the accommodative spirit the opposition has never called forth in its dealings with the government.
That spirit has been absent since day one of Imran Khan’s government, largely because the opposition has never considered it a legitimately elected government. In the view of the opposition, the 2018 election was stage-managed to give Khan the edge over his rivals, who simply had no chance of competing against him given that the army was seen to have engineered the rise of the Tehrik-e-Insaf to power.
That said, the relentless movement of the opposition to drive Imran Khan from power has now reached a climax, which is that he must now face a confidence vote in parliament and test his government’s ability to face the onslaught it now confronts on its authority.
A good number of Imran Khan loyalists have deserted him and may end up voting with the opposition against the government in parliament. A desperate Khan, almost bending over backwards, has opted to have Punjab chief minister Usman Buzdar replaced. The opposition, in cricket parlance, has called it the fall of the first wicket.
It is a dicey situation, and rather curious as well. The dicey is in the absence of a guarantee that Khan will come through the crisis a survivor. The curious comes in a drawing of parallels with the difficulties ZA Bhutto’s government was confronted with once the opposition rejected the results of the March 1977 elections.
Back then, an odd combination of the religious right, socialists, and centrists came together in organizing nationwide demonstrations to force the Bhutto government from power. Today, it is once more a similar amalgamation of diverse interests which has pitted a multi-coloured opposition against the Pakistan government.
Back in 1977, the army stayed quiet until it chose an opportune moment -- and that was when the PPP government and the opposition Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) finally reached a deal that would pave the way for new elections -- to strike.
In today’s circumstances, the fiery nature of the opposition’s crusade against Imran Khan’s government is an eerie reminder of what has been and what might yet be. The feeling, on the part of many in and outside Pakistan, that the coming vote in parliament will bring about an end to the crisis, may well be misplaced.
Khan may ride out, but only just, the storm, or the opposition will have the grotesque satisfaction of turfing him and his party out of office. It will be at that decisive point that one might see the crisis take on newer dimensions.
If the opposition wins the confidence vote, who takes charge of the government?
Assuming that Imran Khan survives the vote, he still will have little reassurance that he can carry on exercising power, which certainly has not been much of a proposition given the preponderance of the military. For one thing, the opposition will not fall silent. For another, the soldiers might have second thoughts about their time-tested role following the vote in parliament.
And it will not matter who wins or loses on the floor of parliament. What will matter is what will play out at army headquarters.
In the overall sense of the meaning, the Pakistan army has been pivotal in the country’s inability to come by a full exercise of democracy. In 1971, it repudiated the results of the country’s very first general election, with consequences that were horrific.
Its ouster of Bhutto was followed in subsequent times by its reluctantly acquiescing in the assumption of power by elected civilian politicians, and then engineering them out of office at moments of its choosing.
Pakistan’s people and its politicians know full well where political power lies. The confidence vote in parliament will not convince Pakistan-watchers that all will be well once the voting comes to pass. Everything could go wrong, indeed could get worse.
These are hard times for Pakistan and its political classes.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
