Above photo: Pakistan’s cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, center, waves to his supporters during a protest near the parliament building in Islamabad, Pakistan, Saturday, Aug 30, 2014. From Mintpress News.
WASHINGTON — For the past three weeks, Pakistan has been bending under the weight of its own Egypt-like crisis, with protesters camped out on the parliament’s doorstep demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the dissolution of the government’s assemblies, and new elections for the sake of a Naya (New) Pakistan.
However, the similarities to Egypt don’t come from the 2011 revolution that saw Hosni Mubarak stripped of power, but from events in 2013, when the democratically elected government of Mohammed Morsi was deposed to make way for new elections that would be more favorable to the army’s interests.
The scenario is all too familiar for Pakistan, which has suffered three successful coup d’etats and spent 33 of its 57 years of independence under military rule. And, as in Egypt, the danger came from the country’s military interests being threatened by a democratically elected civilian ruler that took one step too far.
It would be a shame if another coup were to take place — despite the ruling government’s ineptitudes, of which there are many — because last year’s elections were the first in Pakistan’s history in which one civilian government successfully transitioned to another without military intervention.
Background
The threat to Pakistan’s current parliament, and particularly the ruling party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), emerged on June 27 at a rally in Bahawalpur when Imran Khan, chairman of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf party (also known as the Movement for Justice or PTI), warned the government that it had one month to comply withits demands for electoral reforms and investigations into constituencies where alleged vote-rigging had taken place or 1 million people would march toward Islamabad on Aug. 14, Pakistan’s Independence Day.
Dr. Taimur Rahman, assistant professor of Political Science at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told MintPress News: “The legitimate demands of the opposition, the PTI and the PAT [Pakistan’s Awami Tehrik party], especially with regards to electoral rigging, etc., should be investigated, reinvestigated, that’s entirely legitimate. To not do so is itself an undemocratic step.”
PTI’s demands were not heeded, however, and the Azadi (freedom) march was scheduled for August.
Meanwhile, Tahir ul-Qadri, an Islamic cleric and founder of Pakistan’s Awami Tehrik party (the People’s Movement or PAT), prepared for his own Inqilab (revolution) march toward the capital city to remove Sharif from power, institute a welfare state, and seek justice for the June 17 Model Town incident in which at least seven people were killed. Ul-Qadri, who lives in Canada and has Canadian citizenship, led a similar march in 2013, demanding change to the electoral system and an end to then-President Asif Ali Zardari’s government.
Then, on Aug. 14, Khan’s supporters began their long march from Lahore and converged with ul-Qadri’s devotees in Islamabad. The two parties, while having different goals, worked together to demand the ouster of Sharif and the dissolution of parliament. While they hoped to have 1 million people at the marches, only about 10,000 showed up, and just 1,500 to 2,000 were still camped out in front of parliament last weekend, according to Azam Khan of the Express Tribune.
The demonstrations culminated on Aug. 30, when protesters marched toward the prime minister’s house, where they were thwarted by up to 40,000 security and police forces with tear gas and rubber bullets. As of the writing of this article, the government and opposition parties were in talks to resolve the crisis.
Turning back the clock
While Khan’s demands for electoral reforms and investigations into constituencies where he had proof of election fraud are just and legitimate demands to make of the government, the Azadi and Inqilab marches did anything but offer freedom and revolution. The marches, instead, threatened the modest democratic gains Pakistan has made in the last year, and failed to address larger structural issues that are the real problem behind Pakistan’s democratic deficit: state patronage — something Khan and ul-Qadri are both guilty of.
There are also strong reasons to believe that despite their rhetoric, Khan and ul-Qadri weren’t working in the interests of democratic reform at all, but quite the opposite – they were working hand-in-glove with the military. The security establishment has become upset because of Sharif’s independent approach toward foreign policy, which includes normalizing relations with India, non-interference in Afghanistan, and, most importantly, his attempt to put former president and military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, on trial for treason.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 27: “Pakistani military is close to an agreement with the government in which the prime minister would relinquish control of security affairs and strategic foreign policy… amid anti-government protests that have paralyzed the capital.” A government aide told Saeed Shah of the Wall Street Journal that the military wanted to “cut Nawaz Sharif down to size.”
“The basic point is that the Pakistani military wants control of foreign policy to be able to justify its own size and its own power and authority,” former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani told MintPress in an interview.
Haqqani was also critical of Sharif, saying that he should have had a “plan and a strategy” to challenge the military. “It is important at some point in Pakistani history to hold a military leader accountable but this may not be that point in history. To risk so much, just to put Pervez Musharraf on trial, I don’t think was really worthwhile,” he explained.
He offered former President Zardari’s tactics as an option for dealing with military power, noting that “his view was that civilian assertion will come in stages. You assert yourself. If the heat becomes too much, you back off a little and you gain some ground.”
The military’s hand
Indications of the military’s hand in the Azadi and Inqilab marches became evident during a press conference on Aug. 11, when Federal Minister of Information and Broadcasting Pervez Rasheed (PML-N) said Khan is working under the advice of a “former spymaster,” who he later hinted to be Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who served as director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistan’s CIA) from 2008 to 2012.
A few days prior to Rasheed’s statement, The News International came into possession of an intelligence report stating that the PTI leadership did indeed meet with Pasha. It states, “On 02 August, Lt Gen (R) Ahmad Shuja Pasha (ex-DG ISI) held an in camera meeting for two hours and twenty minutes” in the residence of Provincial Minister for Information, Culture, Environment and Transport in Punjab Shafqat Mahmood (PTI). Mahmood has denied the accusation and said that the government is spreading disinformation.
While some have questioned the authenticity of Rasheed’s statement along with the intelligence report because they both come from the PML-N government, which is at odds with PTI, more damning evidence that Khan and ul-Qadri are coordinating with intelligence authorities, the army, or both came on Monday, when Javed Hashmi, president of PTI, accused Khan of working with the security apparatus.
He quoted Khan as saying, “The ‘badge-bearers’ [army or intelligence] wanted the PTI protesters to move along with those of Tahir ul-Qadri’s PAT and we can’t move forward without them,” which would mean that Khan is in touch with intelligence officials that are guiding the protesters’ actions.
Hashmi went on to say that “Imran had told the core [PTI] committee it [the takeover of the government] won’t be called a martial law…we will file a petition in the Supreme Court and get a judge of our choosing…and he will say okay.” Hashmi continued, saying the “Chief Justice will validate the actions that will be taken… Justice Jillani will retire and the current CJ will become chief justice … and they will get rid [of the government],”reported The Express Tribune. Khan’s quotes refer to the current Chief Justice of Pakistan Nasir-ul-Mulk. He’s saying that once the government is toppled, Mulk will be sympathetic to the “revolution” and rule in favor of new elections, which means that Mulk is also likely coordinating with intelligence officials to overthrow the government.
Khan has denied Hashmi’s accusations inan official press release, which says that he “neither needs to nor would seek to approach the military on political issues… Khan also stated that Hashmi’s statement about the new CJ is a figment of his imagination.”
Another discrepancy, which points to a relationship between PTI, PAT, and the army, is the way in which the latter has reacted to the political crisis. On Tuesday, Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest English-language newspaper,released an analysis of the situation explaining the army’s biased approach to the crisis.
It encourages the reader to consider the sequence of events regarding the army’s action, or rather, inaction. After the parliament was surrounded by thousands of PTI and PAT supporters, the army cautioned “restraint on all sides,” reported Dawn. This is curious, the newspaper contends, because it means that the army is taking PTI’s and PAT’s demands seriously, and that if they say the government is illegitimate, it could be.
After that, the army urged the government to negotiate with the protestors, “as though it was the government that was being unreasonable, and not Mr Khan and Mr Qadri,” who were demanding that the prime minister resign and parliament be dissolved.
Then, the army told the government not to use force against the protesters that were threatening to violently take over parliament and the prime minister’s residence.
“It is simply extraordinary that it is the PAT and PTI supporters who want to break into and occupy state buildings, but it is the government that has been rebuked,” the editorial says.
“It is the government that is supposed to give orders to the army, not the other way around.”
Voice from the Azadi March
On the night of Aug. 30, police stationed outside the parliament assaulted Azam Khan, a correspondent with Pakistan’s Express Tribune, as he tried to exit the area after reporting on the protestors’ attempts to occupy the prime minister’s residence.
This was at the same time that Javed Hashmi was starting to part ways with Imran Khan based on the latter’s decision to guide the protests toward the prime minister’s house. Imran Khan demanded that evening that the prime minister “quit or we will storm your house!” adding, “There can be dialogue only after Nawaz Sharif quits!”
Police and army rangers posted outside of parliament began to ward off protesters with batons and tear gas as they changed direction toward the PM’s residence.
The Tribune’s reporter tweeted that he had no “idea how to avoid extreme tear gase [sic], children and women aré crying [while] IK [Imran Khan], TuQ [Tahir ul-Qadri are] happy [and] safe [in their] containers.” (He was referring to the fact that Khan and ul-Qadri have stationed themselves inside customized shipping containers equipped with windows, heating, and toilets, while their devotees sit on the ground outside and have even dug graves to show that they will not leave until their leaders’ demands are met. The BBC reported that “Khan’s party had had a container converted at a cost of some 12.5m Pakistani rupees [$122,430].”)
He tweeted this photo of protesters being sprayed with tear gas:
Tragedy struck Azam Khan as he attempted to leave the parliament area along the side of the building to avoid the tear gas and violence in the front. Police charged toward him and beat him with batons. Before being knocked out he said he heard one of the officers say: “This is a media person and we should not let him go safely.”
After regaining consciousness at the Polyclinic Hospital in Islamabad, Azam Khan said that he first thought the police had made a mistake and that his was an isolated case of a journalist being attacked. However, after two or three hours had passed, he realized that dozens of journalists had also been assaulted, leading him to believe that it was “scripted.”
“My fear is that journalists were targeted, and I myself was targeted, on behest of intelligence agencies’ officials,” he told MintPress.
He believes that the attacks were planned by intelligence authorities to manipulate media opinion of the sitting PML-N government. The logic is that if media thinks parliament ordered these attacks they will write against it and, thus, public opinion in favor of the protesters. It was reported that up to 40 journalists were attacked that weekend.
State patronage
Other factors to take into account when considering demands being made for free and fair elections by the PTI and PAT are social structures and the role of patronage in acquiring votes during an election.
“If you have just the same social structures of, say, feudal Europe and you have elections in Medieval Europe, would you have expected a vibrant democratic society, state, [and] politics to emerge? I doubt it. The Catholic Church would have probably dominated everything in that period,” quipped Rahman, the assistant professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, when asked about the current crisis, referring to the sometimes undemocratic social structure of Pakistani society, which exists whether or not free and fair elections are held.
He said that there’s a “very strong need to end the structures of what we call landlordism” in Pakistan. He also commented on estimates that as many as 20 million people live as bonded laborers under landlords in Pakistan. “They’re indebted to people who have given them money and they have no freedom of mobility of any sort,” said Rahman.
One of the issues that is important for the electioneering process, though, is that those laborers vote. But they often vote for whatever party their landlord compels them to. So if the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) extends a certain amount of patronage to a landlord in Sindh through giving that person land or money, that landlord might compel all of the people that live on his land to vote for the PPP. “That’s what we have to understand – Pakistan has yet to make that class transition to a democratic society,” said Rahman.
Further, he said that Imran Khan recruited some of the most well-known politicians into his party — politicians who have extensive patronage ties through land ownership and power to act as religious saints for thousands of followers.
One such man is Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the vice chairman of PTI, who owns land in Multan, Pakistan, and is the custodian of a highly venerated tomb to a saint in the city. This position commands a deep well of votes for the politician. Other members of PTI with strong patronage ties include Jehangir Khan Tareen, the secretary general of PTI, and Shafqat Mahmood, the previously mentioned provincial minister for Information, Culture, Environment and Transport in Punjab.
A way out
However, patronage is not an all-encompassing system that accounts for everybody’s actions and voting behavior, and Rahman sees this as an opportunity to encourage steps toward real change.
Due to the disingenuous nature of the Azadi and Inqilab marches, Rahman believes that the first step toward resolving the current crisis is for the government to heed the demands for electoral reform being made by PTI and PAT but keep the government intact.
After that, he explained, it is up to everyday people on the grassroots level to institute the more serious structural changes needed in society with regards to class, sexism, treatment of minorities, and the implementation of labor laws. He said that this should be done through organizing “working people… trade unions… women’s associations… [and] indentured laborers… to strengthen their voice in society.”
He used several movements from around the world to illustrate how this idea would work in Pakistan: “It wasn’t until African-Americans themselves organized and led enormous marches under the leadership of Martin Luther King, or until Gandhi organized the All India Congress, or Nelson Mandela organized the ANC that these bigger changes occurred.”