Who Wants the Army in Politics?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

There’s an old adage saying, one should never forget one’s roots or genesis.

This traditional saying is being given today’s currency by myriad shenanigans of PDM, the motley, polyglot, alliance-of-convenience cobbled by Imran Khan’s political adversaries.

Three seemingly unrelated developments, concurrently taking place the same day, Monday, February 8, in Islamabad should suffice to highlight the Machiavellian strategy of IK’s desperate nemeses to get to their target—of toppling his government by any means, fair or foul.

The first, was a stern rebuke by Maj.General Babar Iftikhar, DG, ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations) in a television chat on a private television channel, Samaa. He rubbished the rumours, from media hacks in hog to the likes of Nawaz and Zardari, that PDM was in ‘back-door’ contacts with the military ‘establishment.’ A concurrent, dissimulation effort from PDM mischievously force-fed the idea that the ‘establishment’ wasn’t averse to these clandestine contacts.

General Iftikhar, in obvious disgust, pleaded on behalf of the armed forces not to seek their involvement in politics; they had their hands full, he added, with the onerous task of defending Pakistan’s frontiers against a host of inimical forces arrayed against Pakistan.

The general didn’t name names but it was fairly obvious who was he pointing his finger at. PDM stalwarts rejected IK’s offer, last week, to have a dialogue with his party in the chamber of National Assembly’s Speaker. A puffed- up Maryam Nawaz had the gall to boast—with an undisguised chuckle that is becoming her totem—that IK was ‘anxious’ to engage her and her ‘colleagues’ of the PDM into a dialogue but they would rather talk to those who’d ‘appointed’ IK. It was just another paraphrasing of PDM’s hackneyed claim that IK had been ‘appointed’ by the army.

Maryam may not have had any inkling that in so arrogantly taking a pot-shot at IK, she was betraying her pedigree. Any student of Pakistan’s chequered political history would tell you who helped her ‘famously-tainted’ father, Nawaz, to gate-crash into politics and who was instrumental in foisting a hedonistic nitwit like him on an unsuspecting people of Pakistan.

There’s an uncanny symmetry of brash and upstart, behaviour pattern between the two off-springs of Pakistan’s most notorious political families, Bilawal and Maryam. The former, too, has been feigning as a stout defender of democratic rights of Pakistan’s civilian politicians. In his latest, headline-making, appeal to the military brass, Bilawal, too, has pleaded for politics and governance to be best left to civilian politicians. One may be hard-pressed to believe that Bilawal is unaware of his grand-father, on his mother’s side, being a discovery, like Nawaz, of the military ‘establishment.’

It only underlines unabashed hypocrisy and cynicism of the two impatiently-ambitious and impudent politicos from Pakistan’s infamous dynastic families. Like their tainted progenitors, they too think of it as their birth-right to take the Pakistani people’s gullibility for granted.

The second notable development of the day was the invasion of Islamabad High Court’s premises by an angry and enraged mob of black-coats—the so-called lawyers belonging to Islamabad’s Legal fraternity. The lawyers assaulting the IHC ramparts and holding its Chief Justice to ransom for three hours, were said to be upset over the demolition of their illegally-constructed ‘chambers’ by the Islamabad administration, a day earlier. For a backlash to it, they decided to take the law in their own hands and teach the IHC judges a lesson as to how powerful their fraternity was.

This eerie incident is disquietingly reminiscent of the brazen assault on the Supreme Court of Pakistan by goons belonging to Nawaz Sharif’s faction of Muslim League in his second stint as PM. In that macabre drama, the then-Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah was in the hair-triggers of the assaulting mob; in this latest episode of it, Chief Justice Athar Minallah, of IHC, was the prized trophy of a wild and unruly bunch of lawyers.

It was sickening to see in the television footage of the assault on IHC ramparts that lady lawyers, too, weren’t above raucous macho conduct. Television cameras caught many a black-coat ladies merrily pelting stones at the IHC buildings and breaking window-panes while raising full-throated slogans on behalf of their fraternity’s ‘rights.’ One would be hard-pressed to come up with a more telling version of decay and decline in the moral values of Pakistan’s supposedly-educated and ‘enlightened’ intelligentsia.

Knowing to what extent the lawyers’ fraternity has been infiltrated and politicised by PML(N) and PPP, during their stints in power, it would strain any Pakistani’s imagination to not infer that in this incident, too, abetment and encouragement from these two political parties wasn’t in play. In their congenital hatred of IK and desperation to see the back of him, at all cost, they may deem it perfectly ‘legitimate’ and warranted to unleash their goons in the lawyers’ fraternity to pose a challenge of their own to the government and—in their convoluted logic—its god-father ‘establishment.’ If nothing else, it would raise their nuisance value, while putting both IK and the establishment on the back foot.

The third development of the day was the apex court, in Islamabad, admitting for hearing a petition from a factotum of the PDM supremo, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, of JUI, challenging the legality of the Presidential Ordinance, promulgated a day earlier, replacing secret balloting with open voting in the upcoming Senate elections, due next month. Incidentally, IK’s government had the decency to seek a clarification from the same apex court on its intent to amend the system of election for the Senate. The government’s reference is still pending before the court.

The JUI petition is a calculated and canny move to corner IK. In its opening gambit to embarrass the IK government, PDM spurned IK’s initiative when he invited his opponents to an in-house dialogue among the parliamentarians. The outright rejection of its dialogue offer has forced the ruling party to resort to a presidential ordinance as the only viable option available to it, all the more so since it can’t force the Supreme Court to decide on its reference well before the Senate elections next month.

The PDM stratagem now makes the apex court a party to the constitutional wrangling over the issue of balloting in the Senate of Pakistan. Open balloting for the Senate election is part of IK’s avowed campaign to rid Pakistan’s politics of its endemic corruption. It’s common knowledge to every Pakistani that horse-trading determines the outcome of any election to the Senate. Vote-buying is made all the easier because of the secret balloting hitherto in vogue. IK has long been sworn to put an end to it.

IK’s cleansing campaign on behalf of transparency received a shot in the arm the very next day, February 9, when KPK’s Law Minister Sultan Khan, from the ruling PTI, resigned on the heels of a video—from the period of Senate Elections, circa 2018—going viral on the social media. The minister can be seen in the video in the company of his peers, all from PTI, counting wads of bank notes as their reward for voting across the party lines. Shamelessly, the price of one vote was pegged at Rupees 50 million. It may be recalled that when stories of vote-buying and selling had broken out, in the wake of those elections, PTI had fired 20 of its MPAs from KPK for their corruption.

So, the battle lines are now unmistakably drawn in a tussle of nerves. The future of Pakistani politics is in the balance. With taut nerves all around, it’s a matter of intense speculation as to who blinks first, who calls the shots and who has the last word. With the chips down, it’s anybody’s call.

What’s, however, certain is that a morally-bankrupt opposition crowd, having miserably failed to instigate a popular uprising, or to have the people behind them in their sinister campaign to oust a popularly-elected IK from office, is making a last desperate appeal to the much-impugned ‘establishment’ to jump into the fray on its side. IK’s adversaries used to mock him, not too long ago in the past, for his oft-repeated reference to the ‘umpire’ raising his finger. Now, they, themselves, are on their knees, literally, beseeching the ‘umpire’ to come to their rescue.

However, General Iftikhar’s robust airing of the ‘establishment’s’ resolve to not get caught in the middle between warring politicians and political factions should suffice to take all the wind out of PDM’s sails. Their sand castle may be about to be blown away. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)