The clashes in Pakistan following an attack on the convoy of protesters led by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan appears to have brought on a crisis which has been in the offing. The parallel march on Islamabad by supporters of Canada-returned cleric Tahir-ul Qadri, to join Khan’s convoy, illustrates the coordinated attempts to unseat the Nawaz Sharif government, elected last year in Pakistan’s first successful transfer of power from one civilian government to another. The face-off between an impatient Khan, who has been challenging the democratic mandate in favour of Sharif by citing electoral irregularities, and Prime Minister Sharif whose governance so far has been indifferent at best, is not innocuous. While Sharif has gone some distance to accommodate Khan — including an invitation to a dialogue as well as an offer to set up a judicial panel to probe the allegations of electoral malpractice — Khan has been shifting the goalposts, thereby calling into question the motives behind the mobilisation.
The Qadri phenomenon — that had laid siege to Islamabad in early 2013 to rid Pakistan of “corrupt rulers”, which ended with the cleric signing a deal with the same rulers on electoral and political reforms — embodies a delayed confrontation that could further destabilise a Pakistani state battling the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and unable to bulwark a sinking economy. The fact that the courts, rarely seen to be neutral entities in Pakistan, have stepped in underscores the depth of the crisis. The Lahore High Court has declared unconstitutional Khan and Qadri’s demands that the PM resign, that parliament be dissolved, that an interim technocrat government take over and that elections be held, even as the Supreme Court ordered state institutions to resist steps that violate the constitution.
