A Tryst with Opportunities or Challenges for Imran Khan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

The holy month of Ramadan, under normal conditions, is taken as a period of hibernation, a pause from the humdrum of life devoted to both introspection and reflection.

But these aren’t normal times, by any stretch of imagination, for anyone in Pakistan, least of all with the government suddenly engulfed by a rising surge in fatalities from the raging Pandemic. The positivity rate of Covid infections has gone past the ten percent mark. In lockstep with that, the daily toll of human lives has inched over two hundred.

Locking into one’s strain of optimism and positivity, any Pakistani should thank their stars that these figures pale into insignificance when compared with what Covid is doing to next door India. The daily count of new cases there has climbed past 350,000 and fatalities more than three thousand a day. The Pandemic is extracting a deadly toll from Modi’s Hindutva-heavy government, which is still allowing millions of devotees and worshippers to bathe, en-masse, in Ganga and calling tens of thousands to its election rallies.

However, in the midst of this unparalleled human misery—in both estranged neighbors and traditional rivals—there’s suddenly a ray of hope for peace to penetrate the long reign of darkness and mutual hostility.

There’s talk of the glacier of hostility and war of nerves melting between India and Pakistan. Pundits—more on the Pakistani side but fewer in the Indian camp—are agog that the two arch rivals are willing to thaw and reach out to each other in search of normalcy in their estranged relations.

Pundits, of Pakistani strain, are gushing with excitement that ‘back-channel’ contacts between the Intelligence aces of India and Pakistan are ripe to bear fruit. Although the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in a television interview with the official Turkish Television, denied the presence of any back-channel diplomacy, another highly placed Pakistani official rebuffed him and said the process of quiet, but constructive, dialogue between the two had been going on for some time. His assertion was corroborated by a spokesman of UAE government. It may be recalled that the UAE FM had paid a hurried, day-long, visit to New Delhi, last month, after which the tiny Gulf Sheikhdom’s pivotal role in these back-channel contacts had become a matter of record.

In the Pakistani context, both its civilian and military leaders have spoken out in favor of putting the past behind and turn a new page in the country’s relations with India. The Indian government of PM Modi hasn’t, to date, been as outspoken as in Pakistan. But, for tea-leaves readers there’s room for optimism in the fact that Modi sent a message of felicitations to Imran Khan, last March 23 on Pakistan Day, which did mention his desire for normalcy in bilateral relations with Pakistan. On top of it all, there’s the ground reality on the LoC to cheer up the Cassandras. Not a shot has been fired, from either side, since last February 25, when the military commanders of both countries reached an agreement to not ruffle each other’s feathers on the LoC.

So, in the midst of the Pandemic-induced gloom and depression, IK may give himself a pat on the back that what he’d affirmed in his maiden comment on relations with India, as Prime Minister of Pakistan, seems to be on the threshold of becoming a reality. His government is taking more than two steps to match India’s one, albeit still hesitant and cautious, step.

There’s room for him to be complimentary to himself, on this sensitive front, although many in Pakistan—especially among those reluctant to him credit for whatever he may have achieved—think that the control button on this unfolding scenario is in the hands of the military establishment. Prominence is being given to Army Chief, General Bajwa’s initiative, vis-à-vis India, in which he publicly lent his weight behind any move to set the past aside and forge ahead by turning the page.

This typical dynamic of primacy of power in Pakistan, i.e. who has the final say on crucial issues of foreign policy and foreign relations, may test IK at the same time as he may bask in the sunshine of a new phase in Pakistan’s tangled relations with India. He will need more in acumen and guile to emerge on the top as the architect of peace with India.

But while opportunity beckons IK on the India front, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has levelled the playing field in the crucial domain of division of power in governance.

In a historic verdict, on April 27, its ten-member bench decided, by a majority of 6 against 4, that all those review petitions—filed before it by lawyers and bar councils against its own earlier decision of June 19, 2020, in the Presidential Reference against Justice Faez Isa—were admissible.

It may be recalled that Justice Isa was the victim of a witch-hunt instituted against him by Pakistan’s notoriously-powerful ‘establishment.’ The power barons were unhappy with the forthright judge because he’d called their bluff and unmasked them, candidly, in his judgment on the 2017 Faizabad Dharna or Sit-in. Members of the military establishment had been caught, on camera, passing on cash to the ultra-right fanatics involved in that siege of Islamabad.

IK’s government erred when it blindly followed through, on the dotted lines, and filed a reference against Justice Isa. The apex court, in its judgment of last year, had quashed the presidential reference as “tainted” but, surprisingly yielded to pressure, from you-know-who, by asking FBR to investigate Justice Isa’s wife, accused by powers-that-be of holding properties in UK beyond the Judge’s means.

This latest verdict of the apex court has declared as illegal FBR’s findings—done in obscene haste—that Mrs Sarina Isa had failed to provide the money-trail for those UK properties.

The apex court, in its latest verdict, has clearly demarcated that it will not allow itself to be pressured or bamboozled, from any quarters. Pundits, with esteem and regard for individual rights of every citizen of Pakistan, are hailing this categorical assertion of its authority by the Supreme Court, as a victory for the rule of law and supremacy of constitutionalism.

The judgment is, no doubt, as much an embarrassment for the civilian government of IK as for the puffed- up military establishment. It carries both an opportunity and a challenge for IK. Opportunity, to draw a clear line of his own, demarcating where the establishment’s influence ends and civilian authority begins. Challenge, whether he has the will to do it, and will he dare to take on the omnipotent military establishment and put an end to the strange phenomenon of the ‘deep state’ perpetually checkmating the ‘real state’? It’s a tall order and may test IK to the hilt, if he picks up the gauntlet. It may be a big ‘if.’

A similar mix of opportunity and challenge awaits him on the increasingly prickly issue of calling the bluff of Pakistan’s notorious ‘Sugar mafia’ which involves his erstwhile close confidant, Jehangir Tareen. For the moment, IK has bought time for himself by appointing a one-man committee to go into the thorny details of the NAB and FIA investigations against Tareen, accused of being the master-mind and king-pin of the sugar mafia. But before appointing this one-man committee—of his confidant Senator Syed Ali Zafar—he has seemingly placated Tareen by firing the FIA Lahore Director, Dr Mohammad Rizwan, from his job of investigating the charges against Tareen.

This sop to Tareen is typical of that syndrome which has become IK’s trade mark in power: one step forward, and two-steps backward. He reiterated, in his parleys with a group of parliamentarians supportive of Tareen, that he would be impartial and fair. But his firing of the principal officer investigating Tareen and his shenanigans is tantamount to throwing a pall of doubt over his impartiality. It’s high time IK divested himself of what increasingly looks, ominously, as a major handicap. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)