Pakistani Politics in a Tug-Of-War among Imran Khan, an Aggressive Military and Radical Islamists
By Mihir S Sharma
October 12, 2020
Across Asia, populists and authoritarians
have taken advantage of the pandemic to go after their political opponents.
Last week, Pakistan’s already frail opposition was dealt a further blow: A case
was filed against the former prime minister and stringent critic of the
military, Nawaz Sharif, for “sedition,” while former president Asif Ali Zardari
was formally charged with corruption. Sharif and Zardari lead different parties
and are old antagonists; all they have in common is that they are now tentative
and distrustful allies against the army-backed government of Prime Minister
Imran Khan.
Imran Khan
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It isn’t hard to see why the Pakistani
state has escalated its attacks on the opposition. Zardari, Sharif and the
Islamist cleric-politician Fazlur Rehman — three very unlikely fellow travelers
— recently launched a joint movement to unseat the government. In exile in
London, Sharif has delivered a series of belligerent, unrestrained speeches in
which he has accused the military of being a “state behind the state” and of
manipulating the election of 2018 that brought Khan to power.
That seems to have been the last straw for
Pakistan’s military establishment. Sedition cases weren’t just registered
against Sharif but also his daughter and heir-apparent Maryam, as well as 44
other leaders of his Pakistan Muslim League. Sharif’s brother Shahbaz, until
recently the chief minister of Pakistan’s populous Punjab province, has also
been arrested. Shortly afterwards, Pakistan’s media regulator banned speeches
or interviews with “fugitives,” clearly meant to prevent the re-broadcast of
Sharif’s speech or others like it.
Others, including ministers from Khan’s
party, have said that criticism of the military in Pakistan is
unconstitutional. Imran Khan’s own response has been to claim that Sharif —
thrice elected prime minister of Pakistan — is an agent of the Indian
government.
The Pakistani military has some hard
thinking to do. Most of its choices in the past three or four years have been
bad ones. First it decided to prop up Khan and his party. As the Pakistani
security analyst Ayesha Siddiqa points out, Khan’s government has failed on at
least two counts that matter to his uniformed backers. It has not been able to
ensure that funds continue to flow into Pakistan’s fragile, externally
dependent economy. Meanwhile, foreign-policy grandstanding, including cozying
up to his fellow populist, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems
to have irritated Pakistan’s most reliable supporters in Riyadh and Beijing.
In time, too, the military may discover
that Khan himself is not quite as biddable as they would like. Earlier this
month, in response to Sharif’s claim that the then-chief of military
intelligence had asked him to quit as prime minister in 2014, Khan claimed
that, in Sharif’s position, he would have demanded the spymaster resign for
making the threat.
While a bit over the top, Khan’s boast is a
reminder that the prime minister has had a proper populist’s ego ever since his
days as a star cricketer. He has claimed that he himself is the personification
of Pakistani democracy and that the army is quietly obedient to him because of
his clean image. One wonders if the only person in the Pakistani establishment
who doesn’t believe Imran Khan is beholden to the military is Khan himself.
On Oct. 16, the joint opposition will face
its first test — a rally in Sharif’s Punjabi heartland. It is a long road back
to power for Sharif’s party and Zardari’s; the former has lost Punjab and the
latter its own power base in Pakistan’s only global city, Karachi. Yet it won’t
be easy to root for the new opposition alliance, either. It is being led, after
all, by the radical Fazlur Rehman, a canny cleric-politician who has openly
said he shares the objectives (if not the dedication to violence) of the
Taliban.
While Pakistan’s Islamist parties have been
junior parties in government before and can draw large numbers of
demonstrators, they have always been electorally marginal. Now, given that the
mainstream political parties are unpopular and enfeebled, this might be the
moment that Rehman and his colleagues have been waiting for. Egypt has shown us
how hard it is for military dictators to fight political Islamism. And in
India, Hindu nationalists were similarly marginal to electoral politics until
they became part of the alliance, 40 years ago, that defeated the authoritarian
Indira Gandhi.
If mainstream parties continue to fade,
Pakistani politics may well see a three-way tug-of-war between a middle-class
populist, an aggressive military establishment and radical Islamists. That is
in nobody’s interest — not even the Pakistan army’s.
Original
Headline: Between Imran, military and
Islamists, Pak may see a three-way tug-of-war
Source:
The Business Standard
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/pakistani-politics-tug-war-among/d/123117
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