CBS News

 

Open Season on Imran Khan in Pakistani Elections?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher of great repute, is credited to have famously said these golden words: “Those not remembering their past are condemned to repeat it.”

Pakistanis of all persuasions—in particular those who, gratuitously, have arrogated to themselves the prerogative of defending Pakistan’s physical as well as ideological frontiers—should have crammed Santayana’s advice to their collective memory. Yet, despite the damning fact that Pakistan has, periodically but regularly, lurched from crisis to crisis, its defenders and leaders seem to have arrogantly ignored it with contempt.

Had they remembered the perspective that triggered the political turbulence cum civil war, of 1971, in East Pakistan that ultimately spawned Bangladesh and truncated Pakistan of its founder, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, they wouldn’t be doing what’s so obvious and palpable to all and sundry, at the threshold of impending general elections, on February 8.

All the guns of Pakistan’s notorious ‘Establishment’— a euphemism used for the generals-in khaki lording over every aspect of the nation’s life—are trained on keeping Imran Khan, and his country-wide popular party, PTI, out of, and away from, the elections.

This is almost a re-run of what followed the December 1970 general elections in the then united Pakistan.

Those elections are remembered in Pakistan as having been most transparent and fair in its meandering history. Conducted under a military dictatorship, they were held fairly because the military geniuses of the day had anticipated a hung parliament at the end of the exercise.

However, the election’s outcome rudely upset their calculations and forced them to go back to their drawing board. The Awami League, from East Pakistan, led by a firebrand Sheikh Mujib, swept the boards in the country’s eastern wing and emerged with a clear and decisive majority. Democratic norms, taken for granted the world over, demanded that power be handed over to Mujib, who had earned the right to lead the country.

But the wizards-in-khaki had other ideas. They abhorred the idea of a Bengali ruling Pakistan. So, they joined hands withsome overly-ambitious political sharks, from West Pakistan, who nurtured their own ambitions to rule. These political opportunists—who need not be named here because their nefarious role in the truncation of Pakistan is known to every Pakistani—collaborated, unabashedly, with the Bonaparte of the day and threw their weight behind the diabolical plans to cheat Mujib and his people of their legitimate right to lead Pakistan. What followed is the darkest episode of our history that needs no elaboration.

The Khaki Machiavellis of today’s Pakistan think they are wiser and smarter than their predecessors. They don’t want to make the mistake of giving a free hand to a modern-day Mujib, aka Imran Khan (IK) or allow his PTI an unhindered run up to the polling booths.

General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s Bonaparte at the time of the 1970 general elections, took his mask off after the election results went against his calculations and put a ‘pesky’ Sheikh Mujib behind the bars.

The incumbent Bonapartes, thoroughly unmasked because of their shenanigans, have taken the precaution of incarcerating IK long before the elections in order to avoid a Yahya-like dilemma. IK is being kept in the dungeon with some help from an obliging and shameless judiciary, at the beck-and-call of the generals.

Taking out further insurance against a troublesome situation staring them in the face, the Bonapartes of the day are putting up all kinds of obstacles in the way of PTI. Instead of dealing with a post-election crisis—like the one that led to the cataclysm after the 1970 elections—they’re doing all they can to make it extremely hard, nearly impossible, for IK and his PTI to become a source of ‘inconvenience,’ to say the least, to the masters of the land of Pakistan.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), supposed to be a neutral and non-partisan body tasked with the sole responsibility of holding free and fair elections in the country, has willingly lent its services to their khaki masters for all the dirty work needed to impede IK’s march to electoral victory.

So overzealous is the ECP in its crusade to crop up as many obstacles as possible in the way of PTI that the daily ‘Dawn,’ no friends of IK or PTI, has been forced to say it, loudly and explicitly, in its editorial of January 5, that ECP is “seeming complicit in efforts to make the upcoming general elections as unfair as possible.”

So brazen are the tactics and maneuvers to keep PTI out in the cold, that nomination papers are being snatched from the PTI candidates in broad daylight with the help of a police behaving more like a colonial police than that of an independent country. The Punjab police, in particular, seem intent on setting up new paradigms of depravity. So outrageous are their tools of torture that they make Hitler’s notorious Gestapo look like amateurs.

PTI candidates are being roughed up, with no remorse, right in the presence of tv cameras. The brutality with which Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a luminary of PTI and a former FM was apprehended by police has gone viral, not only in Pakistan but world-wide. But that kind of humiliation of Pakistan, in the global community, doesn’t faze the masters of the land. To them, it’s an affordable price to pay for their end-game to keep IK away from returning to power through the ballot box.

Not that IK isn’t aware of all these dirty, below-the-belt, tricks being deployed against him and his people. He has no fancy notion of the agenda unfolding against him and his party with the willing help of a complicit ECP and a supine judicial system, with the bad habit of looking over its shoulders at the GHQ, all the time.

The latest unkind cut against PTI has come from a one-judge bench of the Peshawar High Court, restoring ECP’s ban on PTI’s electoral, and popular, symbol of a cricket bat, thus depriving PTI candidates of an icon associated with IK’s exploits on the cricket field. PTI is known by its bat to millions of unlettered voters of Pakistan.

‘The Economist’ in its January 4 issue—the first issue of the prestigious journal in the New Year—has carried an essay of IK in its ‘Guest’ columns, encapsulating the thrust of IK’s travails in the context of the upcoming elections.

In his no-holds-barred characteristic fashion, IK casts doubt, without mincing words, on whether elections will take place, as promised, on February 8.

IK takes up issue with the gauntlets being thrown in the way of his party’s march to the impending elections. He describes the exercise as a “disaster and a farce since PTI is being denied its basic right to campaign.”

Laying bare the hostile environs in which he and his party-men—with their nomination papers rejected by Returning Officers (ROs) on flimsiest grounds with no fear of accountability—are being forced to go to polls, IK cries out, in so many words, “the establishment—the army, security agencies, the civil bureaucracy—is not prepared to provide any playing field at all, let alone a level one, for PTI.”

In the words of the Dawn editorial, quoted above, when it comes to dealing with PTI, in the context of the upcoming elections, there are, in the words of Cicero, “more laws, less justice.”

But the Bonapartes of the day seem unwilling to take any humiliation or embarrassment in their stride. They seem committed to a single item agenda: keep IK and PTI away from power, at all costs! In the latest instance of their litany of tactics to keep IK out in the cold, a little-known ‘independent senator’ of the upper house of Pakistani parliament moved a draft resolution calling upon ECP to put off the scheduled February 8 elections because of ‘security risks’ and harsh winter weather. The maverick senator—obviously a tout of the generals—came up with his outrageous demand to beef up the anti-elections agenda of the establishment. But in doing so, he only lent weight to IK’s fear that the establishment seeks to wriggle out of elections because they’re uncertain of the dice landing in their favor.

The men in Khaki in command of Pakistan seem frozen in time. They are in the mindset of 1971, when the Bonapartes of the then Pakistan opted for blatant resort to force in their arrogance to dictate their rules of the game of thrones over the popular choice of the then electorates. The end result of their arrogance was disastrous.

The Bonapartes of the day may be, mentally and viscerally, frozen in time but the people of Pakistan are not. They have moved on. IK has galvanized the younger generation of Pakistanis; they have become politically conscious. They are no longer the ‘silent majority’ that didn’t fancy, in yesteryears, the idea of taking an active part in the game of thrones. They do now, with a dynamic unknown in the past.

The men-in-khaki should know that 70 percent of Pakistanis are between 18- and 35-year-old. Their idea of a liberal, democratic and a fully sovereign Pakistani entity is poles apart from the vision of the generals who have often sacrificed the national interests of Pakistan at the altar of their personal aggrandizement.

It’s not only the Pakistani youth that have outpaced the pompous generals. Cyber technology, too, has outsmarted ossified generals and negatively impacted their capacity to browbeat the people. A befuddled establishment is fuming how IK reached out to The Economist from behind the bars. But IK’s young aficionados managed to outsmart the baton-yielding generals and, obviously, left them to stew in their own juices.

The overly-ambitious generals, desperately hanging on to the archaic concept of Pakistan being a security state, are, clearly on the wrong side of history.

In their abundant zeal of putting their seal of authority over everything political in the country, the generals are also in betrayal of the vision of the Founder of Pakistan. The Great Quaid was a democrat to his bone-marrow. He’d won the battle of Pakistan not by using force but by dint of his immaculate brains.

Moved by his pertinacious belief in the supremacy of civilians over military in a democratic polity, a prescient Quaid warned the men-in-khaki not to meddle in political affairs of the newly independent state. In his first and only address to the military officers at the Command and Staff College of Quetta, in June 1948—less than three months before his demise—the Quaid categorically and unequivocally said that policy-making was the sole preserve of the civilians. The men in uniform were only to execute that policy.

But Pakistan’s tortured history bears witness that overly ambitious men-in-khaki lost no time in ignoring, and trampling under their boots, the Quaid’s advice. The nation is still paying the price of their wanton betrayal of the Quaid’s legacy.

As these lines were being written, the Supreme Court of Pakistan, under Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, has come up with a new interpretation of Pakistan Constitution’s article 62-1(F) as a consequence of which the life-long disqualification of Nawaz Sharif from holding public office has ended. He and PTI maverick, Jehangir Tareen, are the principal beneficiary of the apex court’s largesse.

Faez Isa’s munificence to a bone-corrupt Nawaz was expected; he was placed at the top of the apex court to render this favor to Pakistan’s most notorious political actor. This is the last strand in the chain of events that commenced with IK’s removal from power, 21 months ago. This is the feather in the crown of the reigning Bonaparte. The ‘Establishment’s hybrid rule over Pakistan through a hand-maiden political leader, upfront, is in its home stretch. The flimsy exercise of general elections, in February, would put the seal of ‘legitimacy’ to this nefarious game. Pakistan remains in perpetual bondage to the men-in-khaki. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)