Pakistan’s destiny: Democracy, autocracy and military interventionism

It has been ten days since the latest general election was held in Pakistan on February 8. For many in Pakistan and outside, the election held amid the spate of violence and the complaints of large-scale rigging and electoral malpractices, as well as the shutdown of the internet, was more of a selection than an election.

Rights bodies dubbed the election and its results neither free nor fair, and UN apex human rights bodies, along with the Western friends of Pakistan (UK, EU, and US), expressed their concern about the nature of the election and issues raised regarding the fairness of its results.

Either King or the King Maker

The history of Pakistan as a nation-state and its quest for elusive democracy have been fraught. Its fate has been intertwined with less democracy and more autocracy, martial law, and military intervention, overt or covert.

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For half of its period of existence, Pakistan has been directly ruled by the military generals, and in the reminder period, when it has not been in the direct control of the army, it has enjoyed a disproportionately high role of grandstanding the governance through the remote control.

The Role Reversal

A case in point is the last two general elections held in 2018 and 2024. It is widely believed that in 2018, the favourite of the military to win the hustings was ex-cricket star turned popular politician Imran Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), with its symbol the cricket bat. Before the election, in 2017, the steel tycoon turned ex-Prime Minister Nawaj Sharif was deposed as Prime Minister for the third time after falling out with the armed forces, and Sharif was banned for life from holding public office after the unanimous judgement of the Pakistan Supreme Court.

Contrary was the case in the 2024 election.

As Pakistan held elections for the 16th National Assembly on February 8, Nawaj Sharif was back on the high pedestal, the life ban on his holding public office was reversed by the Supreme Court, and the corruption cases were dropped. A pre-poll consensus made Sharif the favourite candidate of Pakistan’s military to return as Prime Minister.

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Contrarily, ex-PM Imran found himself lodged inside the jail under a tsunami of at least 180 criminal charges, convicted for more than 31 years in jail in three distinct cases of Toshkhana, leaking state secrets, and un-Islamic marriage.

Khan was also made ineligible to hold public office.

Notwithstanding the army’s denial of any interference in the election any longer, the writing on the wall was clear well before the election: Nawaz Sharif would take over as Prime Minister once again after the election. He had already been selected, and all that was needed was getting anointed at the auspicious moment.

Attock Jail, Barrack 3, Quaidi No. 804

While all seemed lost for Imran and PTI with the stage set for the coronation of Nawaz Sharif, the longest-serving prime minister of Pakistan, having served a total of more than 9 years across three tenures, for the record fourth term, the Pakistan electorate did something seldom expected of it.

It was an election where Imran’s PTI was denied participation in the election as a party; most of its leaders were hounded and stuffed behind bars, and many were forced to leave the party altogether.

PTI candidates were deprived of the party symbol cricket bat, and its members were forced to fight the election as independents, thereby tilting the election against PTI specifically because, in a country with 42 per cent illiterate voters, it was the party symbol that helped the voters cast their ballots in favour of their favourite party and the candidate.

Such being the case, the election results were considered a done deal even before a single vote was cast.

But it was not to be.

Despite being an election in which Imran Khan was not on the ballot box but rather was incarcerated as Quaidi No-804, Barrak 3 of Attock Jail, he stumped the armed forces out. Every vote cast in favour of Khan was against the army.

Political Engineering Gone Wrong

The problem with Pakistan is that, irrespective of who holds the reign of the civilian government, the military holds the lever over the domestic policies, political matters, and geo-strategic trajectory of the country. Every time the civilian government fell out of favour of the establishment in the past, it had to go, and meekly so.

But what has happened since April 2022, when Imran Khan was ousted in a parliamentary no-confidence vote, has no parallel in Pakistan. It is an especially fraught moment for the country, where the political engineering by the establishment has gone horribly wrong. The more vicious the effort to decimate Imran Khan and PTI, the bigger and more sustained has been the defiance.

Never in Pakistan has there been a no-holds war between the most entrenched institution and the most popular leader. Worse, never before has a civilian politician challenged the establishment and survived. What is happening is new in the country on the other side of Bharat, and Khan has a new constituency of supporters in this fight—young, restive, educated, and urbane—powered by new- technology and social media.

Unsurprisingly, then, for the first time, the history of the relationship between an establishment and a political leader is being written in the streets of Pakistan.

And Vote Goes To

After 76 years of independence, Pakistan remains in funk. Out of 240 million people, as per the World Bank, 95 million live in dire poverty, and more than 42 per cent are illiterate. Also, its demography has been witnessing a shift, with 65 per cent population being below 30 years old and 44 per cent of the 128 million electorate between 18 and 30 years old, including 24 million first-time voters.

It is this young, illiterate, and literate restive voter who, in the latest election, seems to have heralded the Pakistan Spring. They have done the unthinkable, and despite the cricket bat snatched away, they have enabled Imran Khan to inflict stinging defeat on proxy parties of the establishment hands down from the other side of the bar. It would not be an exaggeration to say that what the PTI has achieved is next only to what the Awami League of Mujibur Rehman did in 1971.

Despite the litany of woes and all the guns loaded against them, PTI affiliated candidates stunned established parties PML-N and PPP, the establishment (a euphemism for Pakistani military and intelligence), poll pundits, and domestic and external observers. And they achieved this feat despite being forced to fight as independents, with each candidate being forced to have a separate election symbol. Worse, denied the benefit of physical campaigning, they were forced to take recourse to YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and artificial intelligence.

Everything that could have gone wrong for Imran, PTI, and its candidates except the election results. As per the finally declared results, PTI affiliated independents won 93 seats and have lodged cases in courts claiming victory in at least 40 seats more. The latest claim of PTI is that at least 85 seats won by it in Parliament were snatched by rigging, and PTI claims the outcome of the Pakistani elections will be remembered due to the biggest fraud in the country’s history and its successful candidates.

Nonetheless, 93 out of 265 seats, won by PTI affiliated independents, is not enough to form a government as no party is close to a simple majority of 134 seats. PML-N, the party of Nawaj Sharif, is second with 75 seats, the PPP of Bilawal Bhutto 54 seats, and MQM 17 seats.

But lo and behold, Imran Khan Quaidi No. 804 Barrack -3 clearly bowled out the Pakistani military and its preferred political dispensation with his googly.

Enter the Dragon

Even before the contested election results were formally announced by the Election Commission, Pakistani army chief Syed Asim Munir entered the fray with his statements to parties and leaders to rise above self-interest. He further added:

“Pakistan’s diverse polity and pluralism will be well-represented by a unified government of all democratic forces imbibed with national purpose. Elections and democracy are means to serve the people of Pakistan and not ends in themselves. The nation needs stable hands and a healing touch to move on from the politics of anarchy and polarisation which do not suit a progressive country of 250 million people.”

Seldom in a democratic nation, the chief of the armed forces issues guidance notes to political parties and leaders on election results and the formation of the government.

Khan Nominates Khan

Independent watchdogs both from within and outside Pakistan concur that had it been an independent, transparent, free, and fair election, and had effort not been made to unsuccessfully decimate Imran Khan by the Election Commission, Armed Forces, and the Judiciary, the result would have been overwhelming in favour of Imran Khan and his party.

For whatever it is worth, Khan has also announced a candidate for the post of the Prime Minister. He is another Khan with a pedigree: The USA educated 56-year-old former Finance Minister and Secretary General of PTI, Omar Ayub Khan, the grandson of Ayub Khan, the first military dictator of Pakistan.

Interestingly, Ayub Khan is also a past member of PML-N of Nawaz Sharif. And he was also part of the ruling dispensation of the former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Omar Ayub Khan contested and won a seat in the latest election despite his absence from the campaign trail as he is in hiding and wanted in various investigations of at least 21 criminal charges against him by the law enforcement agencies, including charges of being a part of the rioting that followed Imran Khan’s arrest.

Implosion of the Election Machinery

Giving credence to the contention of Imran Khan that the election has been stolen away, amid the claim and the counterclaim of rigging of election results, Liaquat Ali Chattha, Election Commissioner of Rawalpindi, has resigned after a press conference after admitting manipulating the election results under pressure. He has also accused the Chief Election Commissioner and Chief Justice of complicity in the alleged manipulation of results. Also, there is a case in the Supreme Court to declare the elections null and void.

Prize Goes to Establishment

Notwithstanding the confusion, chaos, and near consensus on the lack of transparency and fairness of the election and the counting process, indications are that it is an advantage to the armed forces once again. The most probable emerging political scenario is that, barring a last-minute miracle, establishment-blessed PML-N will lead an unstable coalition government of six parties, including the PPP and MQM.

But instead of assuming the crown of thorns and heading a weak, unstable government, Nawaz Sharif has nominated his younger brother, ex-PM Shehbaz Sharif, to be PM under the coalition.

As the events unfold, the PPP will either be part of the government or, if Bilawal Bhutto has his way, give it support from the outside. Quite clearly, the government, with its dubious and questionable integrity and legitimacy, will be dependent on the military for its survival. The armed forces will set the agenda and tenure of the government.

Writing on the wall is that the PTI-supported lawmakers will sit in opposition for now and will get increasingly bellicose in the street and belligerent in the Parliament and the court. Imran Khan, either in jail or on bail, will be more vociferous and increasingly hostile to the establishment and the new government.

Hybrid All the Way

An unstable and weakly palatable civilian government headed by a predictable and pliable leader is what the Pakistani military is most comfortable with. It is this hybrid arrangement where the weak civilian governments do the bidding of the military and where generals call the shots without being accountable that is the destiny of Pakistan. Such an arrangement gives the establishment the best of both worlds—the lever to control domestic and international policies while at the same time not being accountable.

For a long time, such an arrangement has been the course in Pakistan.

Not the Right Nostrum

Such a conundrum at sixes and sevens is not the nostrum that badly bruised and fractured Pakistan needed. The country is in a deep morass of economic funk, with the economy in tatters, inflation galloping over the roof, the fast-depreciating currency being the worst performer in Asia, and foreign currency reserves at alarmingly low levels and depleting faster than ever. Come April, the new government will be forced to negotiate its next bail package with the IMF, the 24th since the country was formed in 1947. A weak, unstable government is not what the doctor ordered if structural reform measures must be taken to meet IMF terms and stabilise the economy.

Fractured election results have put Pakistan in an unviable position about the stability of the future government to focus on critically needed economic reforms, governance, and security challenges. The matter gets further complicated with the new scenario, whereas per the World Bank, in FY2023, with another 12.5 million falling into poverty, 40 per cent of the country’s population is mired in abject poverty.

Indubitably, it will be one of the shakiest governments to have ever ruled Pakistan in a not-before-experienced situation in the country when the compact between the military and political set up of decades has been badly shaken.

Problems in Conception of State

The idea of a separate Muslim state in north India was not very new but had not gained currency until the 1930s. To understand the present predicament of Pakistan, one must traverse the history of its creation. The concretization of the idea of Pakistan emerged barely 14 years before its creation, originally as an idea of PAKASTAN in a pamphlet “Now or Never” in 1933 by a Cambridge student, Rahmat Ali, around the time of the Round Table Conference in London to deliberate upon and frame a federal structure for India was being held.

And it further gained currency in the late nineteen thirties and early forties under Jinnah‘s two nation theory. Though it is difficult to rewrite the contour of history, history beckons that there would not have been a country today named Pakistan for India to deal with; had the proposals of the Cripps Mission been accepted by the Congress, the Congress would have joined the war government, and the Quit India Movement would not have launched. The latter put Mahatma Gandhi in jail till 1944, and other Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, till 1945, a period during which Mohammad Ali Jinnah hobnobbed with the British, and Churchill got a ‘bit of India in the name of Pakistan, which he wanted.

I paraphrase Congress leader KM Munshi, who wrote and which journalist and author Utpal Kumar quotes in his latest book, “Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy”. Munshi said in 1951-

“Today we realize that if the Cripps proposal had been accepted, there would have been no Partition, no refugees and no Kashmir Problem.”

It is worth noting that, despite the resistance of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Cripps Mission was an idea of his wartime British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Author David Reynolds, in his latest book “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders who shaped him” (October, 2023) writes clearly that the idea of Cripps proposals germinated in June 1938, when Atlee spent a weekend at Cripps country house, where he and other Labour politicians met Jawahar Lal Nehru and tried to move on from the failure of the implementation of the Government of India Act, 1935.

But it was not to be.

The partition happened and brought in its train the world’s biggest two-way displacement of humanity and the killing of over two million people in the name of religion, and India has been handed an unstable and belligerent neighbour for the past seventy-six years.

Not Yet a Nation State

It is fraught to attempt the history of proximate events before the past is first fully incubated. Nonetheless, the seventy-six years of history of Pakistan does indicate that it is far from developing as a nation-state. It continues to struggle to make the coherent Gestalt of its different disjointed parts and remains an artificial creation where, despite more than seven decades gone by, the common denominator “Islam” of the “Two Nation Theory” has failed to meet the aspirations, requirements, and demands of its parts, Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis, and Punjabis, with Bengalis having already ceded in 1971.

An Inauspicious Beginning

The birth of Pakistan was inauspicious. Its creator, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, died in less than 13 months of the creation of Pakistan and its first Prime Minister. Liyaqat Ali Khan, its first Prime Minister since 1947, got assassinated on October 16, 1951. Within eleven years of Pakistan’s independence and six years after his assassination, Pakistan had six prime ministers and four governor generals in seven years. Diplomat TCA Raghavan writes in his book “The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan" that the “consensus is that for half of the first eleven years of Pakistan, it was General Ayub Khan and the army that were in charge."

Rule of the Generals

What has hurt the development of Pakistan as a nation-state and democracy most, is the legacy of it being ruled by generals under various names: Martial Law Administrators, Presidents, and Chief Executives. Pakistan so far has been directly ruled for half of its existence by four Generals: Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf, and irrespective of the nomenclature of their designation, they have ruled with the iron fist as dictators. The most sinister implication of frequent military coups has been the discontinuity in the governance process, frequent interruptions in the political setup, in the running of the government, and indeed in the running of the parliament.

And the biggest casualties have been the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan has seen three constitutions so far and frequent mutilations of every constitution.

Troubled History of Military Coups

Here is a brief bird’s-eye view of Pakistan’s tryst with military coups and dictatorships that have torpedoed the nation building:

Pakistan’s first martial law continued from 1958 to 1972, a long fourteen years. It started with the coup in 1958, when Pakistan Commander-in-Chief General Ayub Khan sacked Iskander Mirza, the Governor General, in a bloodless coup, and thus Khan became the first military dictator with the designation of President. Ayub Khan ruled with an iron hand for more than a decade.

Mirza was exiled to England.

Two, when the discontentment began in the East Pakistan, instead of resigning, Ayub Khan allowed Yahya Khan, the then Commander-in-Chief of the Army, to declare martial law and take power, which he did on March 25, 1969. And despite a transparent election in which East Pakistani leader Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman’s Awami Muslim League (AML) party emerged the winner but was not allowed to form government by Yahya Khan and the AML’s main political rival, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Bangladesh was created post-defeat of Pakistan in the 1971 war. It was only in 1972 that the martial law was lifted and Bhutto became prime minister in 1973 after a new constitution proclaimed Pakistan a democratic country. The reign of Bhutto lasted till 1977.

In 1977, elections were held both in India and Pakistan. In India, in a free, fair, and peaceful election, the Janata Party came to power, trouncing the Indira Congress. In Pakistan, where the Pakistan National Alliance accused Bhutto of election rigging, General Zia-ul-Haq removed Bhutto in a bloodless coup, suspended the constitution, and declared martial law.

Haq promised a free and fair election within 90 days but stayed on for 11 years when he was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. In between, he had a sham of a party-less election in 1985 after which Muhammad Khan Junejo was appointed the prime minister while Haq was president.

Haq dismissed Junejo after three years in 1988, before he himself got killed in the plane crash.

Between 1988 and 1998, it was Kissa Kursi Ka, with Nawaz Sharif PML-N and Benazir Bhutto, PPP, two bitter rivals as PM and both facing the music of falling out of favour with the armed forces.

The last military coup in Pakistan was on October 14, 1999. It was another bloodless coup in which army chief Pervez Musharraf overthrew the government of Nawaz Sharif and declared martial law styling himself as Chief Executive. Finally, Musharraf resigned in 2008 and Asif Ali Zardari took over as president.

Theoretically, Pakistan has been under civilian rule since 2008, but the army has always played a larger-than-life role. If a premier goes against the establishment’s wishes, he/she loses power and government.

His Master’s Voice

Direct rule by military generals is not the only problem. Even when it is not the right military dictatorship, the trigger-happy military is seldom confined to the barracks. Civilian governments come, take positions, and go as per the wishes of the military establishment. Nothing can exemplify it better than the fact that, so far, none of the 23 Prime Ministers of Pakistan have been able to complete their full terms. A case in point is what happened to Imran Khan, the Prime Minister elected in 2018. In April, 2022 he was booted out in a no confidence motion and has been hounded by the military since then. His predecessor and current military favourite, Nawaz Sharif, had to go three times—in 1993, 1999, and 2017—every time because he fell out of favour of the military. And the most famous case is that of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom Haq executed during the military regime.

Be that as it may, it is unsurprising that the invincible position of the military has often created an “almost dangerous” competition among Pakistan’s politicians, ready to play music that is dear to the military just to stay in power.

It is this compact between military and political dispensation that has been challenged in this election.

What Pakistan Needs

To survive and thrive as a nation, Pakistan must have a functional democracy. Its governance needs a structural transformation where its military goes back to barracks. The country must learn the basic thumb rule. It must have free, fair, and transparent elections. It is a given that in hustings, some will win while others will lose. For those who win, it is their duty to run the nation; those who lose must provide constructive opposition and assist the government in taking the nation forward. And different pillars of the nation, including the judiciary and armed forces, must be confined to their roles. But such a system will function only when every player respects the other and plays their role.

As regards India, which has been forced into four armed conflicts and many near-conflict situations, it is time to decouple Bharat from Pakistan while keeping it on tight ropes.

The author is a multi-disciplinary thought leader with Action Bias and an India based impact consultant. He is a keen watcher of changing international scenario. He works as President Advisory Services of Consulting Company BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.