Opinion With yet another PM’s exit, army shows it reigns supreme in Pakistan

Less than four years later, he is on the edge of a political precipice and Naya Pakistan continues to stare at its long-standing problems. He has presided over an economy characterised by high inflation, sliding (Pakistani) rupee, dwindling foreign exchange reserves and a mounting debt burden. The relationship with India remains fraught. His attempts to forge a relationship that goes beyond Afghanistan with the Biden administration have failed. He managed to alienate Saudi Arabia in 2020, making them recall one of their loans and end the deferred payment facility for oil imports. The army leadership had to step in to mollify the Saudis. He has failed to stem extremism and terrorism.

Every civilian surrogate promoted by the army has sooner or later felt stifled and defied them at the cost of their wrath. There were reports of the army leadership’s unhappiness with the performance of Usman Buzdar — Imran Khan’s appointee at the helm in Punjab province — and the PM’s foreign policy failures. Things came to a head late last year because of Imran Khan’s desire to retain the former director-general of the ISI, Faiz Hameed, against the wishes of army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, who suspected Hameed of forging self-serving links with the PM with an eye on becoming the army chief on the completion of Bajwa’s tenure in November this year. Bajwa had his way in moving Hameed out of the ISI, but the damage was done. This was followed by signals of neutrality in political affairs from the army leadership. The Opposition’s efforts that had hitherto failed to dislodge Imran Khan from office gathered steam, culminating in a joint no-confidence motion against the government. The small parties allied with the government had started hobnobbing with the Opposition. The dissidents within the PTI also found their voice. The ensuing wheeling and dealing have resulted in the numbers in the National Assembly shifting against Imran Khan and, barring a last-minute miracle, the fate of his government appears sealed.

The most-talked-of scenario in the event of Imran Khan’s ouster is a government headed by PML(N) President Shehbaz Sharif, who is more acceptable to the army than his elder brother, Nawaz. However, he may not want to remain in power for too long and incur the burden of anti-incumbency. Opposition unity will also not last too long as all parties position themselves for the election due in the normal course in the second half of 2023. Therefore, Pakistan could see an early election. The army seems to have no clear favourite as of now and unless it acquires one before the election, it may settle for a less than ideal scenario, confident of its ability to deal with an inconvenient dispensation.

Imran Khan has responded by, inter alia, wrapping himself in the flag and claiming that he has defended Pakistan’s interests despite external pressures. This is also an attempt at image-building for future political battles. He alleges a foreign conspiracy and funding to oust him and has played up a letter purportedly conveying a threat from an American official in the context of his visit to Russia last month amid the raging Ukrainian crisis. Without naming the US, a senior minister has claimed that the foreign country threatened trouble for Pakistan in case the no-confidence motion against Khan failed — a charge denied by the Americans. All this is tilting at windmills. The PM has lost in a purely internal political game.

The no-confidence motion, however, does not signal a consolidation of democracy in Pakistan. Recent events, if anything, reaffirm the army’s supremacy. Their support brought Imran Khan to power and warded off threats from his opponents and their “neutrality” has placed him on a slippery slope. As the numbers game turned decisively against Khan on March 30, Bajwa met both him and President Arif Alvi, signalling that he was not a disinterested bystander.

Though Imran Khan has proved to be utterly inept, his fate begs the question — yet again — whether any prime minister, even the most competent one, can succeed in Pakistan without a radical shift in its internal and external orientation. The civil-military imbalance ends up paralysing every prime minister. Further, Pakistan’s army-led adversarial posture towards a much bigger and better endowed India places unsustainable burdens on its cash-strapped economy.

Owing to the army’s tight control over Pakistan’s foreign and security policies, the fate of a civilian leader can, at best, have a marginal impact on Pakistan’s external posture and key relationships. The dispensation succeeding Imran Khan’s — in the event of his ouster — will take power with Pakistan already in an electoral cycle and is likely to focus on the economy to give some relief to people and earn their goodwill, thus ruling out any bold foreign policy moves. If, however, the economic focus leads to a move to resume trade with India (its suspension since August 2019 has hurt the Pakistani economy and is resented by segments of trade and industry), we should facilitate the process as it helps our exporters too. Moreover, Khan has painted himself into a corner by calling for the reversal of the decision to withdraw the special status of Jammu and Kashmir for any bilateral engagement, indulging in anti-India rhetoric and poking his nose in India’s internal political discourse. He has seemed politically incapable of carrying forward army chief Bajwa’s tactical agenda to lower the temperature with India.

If a new dispensation manages to shun Imran Khan’s anti-India rhetoric, that would in itself be a plus for India’s problematic relationship with Pakistan.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 1, 2022 under the title ‘The army’s government’. The writer is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan