NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Imran Khan came to power in 2018, promising a ‘Naya Pakistan’, in an election heavily engineered by the army in his favour. Less than four years later, he is widely regarded as a failure and finds himself under political siege, while Pakistan continues to confront its old problems: a collapsing economy, high inflation impacting the common man, rampant extremism and terrorism, a volatile western border and a fraught relationship with India.
Backed by the army, Imran Khan adopted an autocratic style of governance and targeted his opponents in accountability cases, of which some prominent ones have come unstuck. Eleven opposition parties—including PPP and PML(N)—came together in September 2020 to constitute the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) to, inter alia, dislodge Imran Khan and push for the army staying away from the country’s political life and civilian affairs. However, the PDM lost steam (after showing some initial promise in garnering public support) when the PPP and Awami National Party (ANP) left it on the issue of resigning from the federal and provincial legislatures, and it was seen as not posing an immediate threat to the Imran Khan government. PPP was said to be reluctant to sacrifice its government in Sindh and was not in agreement with Nawaz Sharif’s approach of attacking the army leadership directly and forcefully.
The political dynamics have changed with elections due next year. The prime minister is reaping the whirlwind of his authoritarian style of functioning: he has alienated some of his closest associates, notably Jahangir Khan Tareen, a wealthy sugar baron, who had contributed significantly to his victory in 2018, both politically and by bankrolling his campaign, and is said to enjoy the loyalty of sizeable blocs of disgruntled legislators in the National and Punjab assemblies. Growing public disenchantment with the PTI government and the rising graph of the PML(N) in Punjab have sown uncertainty in the minds of the government’s allies and legislators concerning the party’s winning potential in the next election. This, together with the perception that the military leadership is maintaining a neutral stance in political matters following the public differences between army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and Prime Minister Imran Khan on appointment of DG(ISI) late last year, has infused the opposition with a new energy. With barely one more year left of its government’s tenure in Sindh, the PPP also sees merit in joining the opposition onslaught on the government.
As of this writing, a PPP-led public march, which set off from Karachi on February 27, has reached Islamabad, traversing Sindh and Punjab. Earlier the remainder PDM had threatened to mount a march on Islamabad against rising prices on March 23, celebrated as Pakistan Day. Imran Khan, who had used the instrumentality of bringing public marches to Islamabad against the Nawaz Sharif government, is getting a taste of his own medicine. The combined opposition filed a no-confidence motion against the government on March 8 and requisitioned a session of the National Assembly, which the Constitution requires the Speaker to convene within 14 days. The opposition claims that it has the numbers to oust Imran Khan. The prime minister, on the other hand, has struck a defiant note, claiming that the motion will be defeated and has wrapped himself in the flag by playing up his government’s neutral stance on the Ukrainian crisis in spite of pressure from the west. The government of Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar, who is close to Imran Khan, also faces uncertainty.
The opposition has offered no clarity on what might follow in the event of their motion succeeding. The possibilities being talked of are: an early election and a short lived non-PTI government till next year, but with no indication of who among the opposition might lead it. There has also been talk of a new prime minister to head the PTI government to stave off desertion by its disgruntled legislators. The names being mentioned are Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who has been close to the army, and Defence Minister and former Chief Minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pervez Khattak.
The opposition attempts to corner/topple the Imran Khan government had come a cropper till late last year due to the helping hand of the army, particularly the former DG(ISI) Faiz Hameed. Efforts by the opposition after the aforementioned Imran Khan-Bajwa discord to block important legislation, including Imran’s favourite law to introduce electronic voting machines, also did not succeed. The prime minister was able to keep his flock together through some tough bargaining with wavering legislators and allies. The opposition momentum is much stronger this time. Will it produce a different result? Only time will tell.
Aside from general interest in the political drama unfolding next door in a country where genuine democracy has not taken root, what significance do these developments hold for India? The short answer is: not much. Can a change of prime minister make a marked difference to Pakistan’s internal and external orientation? The answer again is the same. Pakistan’s civilian façade barely conceals the reality of the army’s stranglehold on the Pakistani polity, to which no end is in sight. We have seen more recently how the army systematically sabotaged Nawaz Sharif’s agenda to improve relations with India.
Imran Khan’s governance record and style of functioning have left much to be desired. But the reality is that no prime minister can succeed in Pakistan without a change in its internal dynamics, notably the civil-military imbalance, the source of most of its long standing woes. The army being particularly possessive of Pakistan’s foreign and security policies, a prime minister can at best make a marginal difference in the external domain.
The army-led adversarial posture of Pakistan towards a much bigger and better endowed neighbour, India, imposes an unbearable burden on the Pakistani economy which, together with poor resource mobilisation and entrenched economic interests, has resulted in periodic economic breakdowns. Defence budget and debt servicing spare little resources for the remaining government activities. Therefore, Pakistan continues to depend upon external aid and borrowing, with the latter assuming an ever growing proportion as western assistance has dried up. Extremism and terrorism within Pakistan are the fruits of its policy, once again army led, to encourage religious extremism and use it both for promoting the army’s domestic agenda and perpetrating terror against India and Afghanistan.
In spite of Pakistan suffering a horrendous terror blowback, the above policy has not been abandoned, though tactical adjustments are made in response to external constraints, such as the ongoing Financial Action Task Force scrutiny. The lynchers of a Sri Lankan factory manager, accused of blasphemy, in Sialkot in December last year were inspired by the ideology of the Sunni Barelvi extremist organisation Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), with which the government had made a compromise only weeks earlier in spite of its extremely violent agitation. According to Pak media reports, the civilian government wanted to take strict action against them but was counselled restraint by the army leadership. TLP was used by the army for electoral engineering against Nawaz Sharif in 2018 and can be of similar help in future too. Further, the short-sighted army backing the Afghan Taliban over the years against all odds contributed significantly to their victory last year. However, it has not reduced the volatility of Pakistan’s western border. Differences have cropped up between the two sides notably on the Durand Line and action against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) cadres in Afghanistan, who have continued to commit egregious acts of violence in Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban have been reluctant to act against the TTP due to their ideological affinity, though they have brokered so far unsuccessful peace talks between them and the Pak authorities.
The public version of Pakistan’s National Security Policy (NSP), released in January this year, places economic security at the core of national security and emphasises geo-economics to make Pakistan a trade and transit hub. Similar thoughts had been expressed both by PM Imran Khan and army chief Bajwa at a security conference in Islamabad in early 2021. However, Pakistan’s emphasis on geo-economics, while abnegating trade and transit links with India, makes little sense. The NSP speaks of improving relations with India but places “a just and peaceful resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute” at the centre of the bilateral relationship. This in essence has been Pakistan’s publicly expressed position over the years. However, Pakistan’s volubility on the need to resolve Kashmir has been matched by its reluctance to work and settle for a practical, forward looking and mutually acceptable solution. It did not show the wisdom to take to their logical conclusion the backchannel (2004-07) understandings on Kashmir, which proceeded from the logic of both countries moving away from their maximalist positions and the need for a non-territorial solution. This raises the question whether Pakistan desires a mutually acceptable solution or uses Jammu and Kashmir as a perennial plank of hostility against India. There is no indication of a strategic shift in Pakistan army’s posture towards India, with the exception of tactical retreats made from time to time under compulsion.
The aforementioned Pak pronouncements are, however, an indicator of Pakistan’s growing problems, particularly economic, in continuing with its old policies towards India and a reflection, albeit only partially, of the thinking of a sizeable segment of opinion in Pakistan that sees the need to build a stable relationship with India in the interest of Pakistan and its people. There have been calls of late in Pakistan, including from Prime Minister Imran Khan’s adviser on commerce, to open trade with India. In my view, such factors that may open opportunities for India to build on the LoC ceasefire of February 2021 by way of trade linkages etc., thereby helping in better management of this relationship than has been possible in the last few years, are more important than the fate of a particular Pakistani politician.
(Sharat Sabharwal is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan. He is the author of the forthcoming book ‘India’s Pakistan Conundrum—Managing a Complex Relationship’. Views expressed in this article are personal.)
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