Pakistan is in crisis following the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan earlier this week, and although he has since been released, the country’s future remains deeply uncertain.
After Khan was arrested by paramilitary officers on Tuesday corruption charges for allegedly receiving a bribe in the form of land, mass protests broke out across the country (sometimes violently). Internet service was suspended in many regionsand at least 2,800 people were arrested and eight have died.
This political crisis is, in a sense, a year in the making after Khan was forced to step down as prime minister in April 2022. But it is also a reckoning for the country’s democracy and an indictment of Pakistan’s military, which has played an outsized role. in the country’s politics, when not actively leading the government.
Even though Khan is out of jail, that doesn’t mean the unrest has died down. The army has been deployed in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the capital, Islamabad, since Wednesday to try to quell the protests. Interim Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, himself subject to corruption charges, said on Saturday that protesters who took part in the violence would be charged in anti-terrorism courts.
Khan was already a legend in Pakistan before he entered politics, but the uproar over his arrest is far more than his days as his country’s top cricketer. Rather, Khan’s populist rhetoric and open conflict with the military have struck a chord with younger Pakistanis in particular, a constituency he has long courted. And with record inflation, ethnic and jihadist violence and stark class inequality defining the lives of many Pakistanis, it’s no wonder that Khan’s claims of political purity and his alleged willingness to stand up to the military are inspiring. unprecedented displays of loyalty.
“Although public awareness of the military’s political role predates the rise of Imran Khan, supporters of any Pakistani political party have thronged military establishments as well as army headquarters to protest against the victimization of their leaders,” Muhammad Salman, a faculty member at Habib. University of Karachi’s department of comparative humanities, told Vox. “This represents a new awareness in Pakistan of the army’s problematic political role, as well as a desire that it must end now.”
Pakistan’s democracy has been fragile since its founding in 1947, defined by multiple military coups interspersed with political dynasties widely seen as corrupt. Khan, who came to power in 2018 and was initially closely allied with the military, also positioned himself as an outsider who would root out corruption in the political class before being ousted. This week’s saga has essentially cemented his political comeback.
The saga has also presented Pakistan with an unimaginably challenging and possibly existential dilemma: stick with the old cycle of military repression and embezzlement by corrupt political families, or side with a populist who openly and violently disrupts the status quo, that he himself has been accused of corruption. i whose anti-establishment stance may be more about politics than principle?
How did Pakistan get here?
Khan has been involved in politics for decades, founding his own political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), in 1996. He initially stood behind the Pakistan Army, even supporting the coup General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. He came to power in 2018 and the military returned the favor during Khan’s early years in office, but the relationship soured when Khan asserted his independence, refusing to promote the military’s preferred leaders.
Allegations that Khan sought to install an ally as army chief against the wishes of the military establishment they were reported in the country’s press last spring, which resulted in a vote of no confidence. A parliamentary coalition made up of smaller parties and the parties of the Bhutto and Sharif political dynasties removed him as prime minister.
“The events leading up to Khan’s ouster suggest that the withdrawal of military support had taken place, even as the military claimed ‘neutrality,'” Salman said. “However, the events leading up to the no-confidence vote strongly suggested that the military had orchestrated Khan’s removal. For example, smaller parties susceptible to [the] Army manipulation such as MQM, PML-Q, BAP…withdrew their support to Khan’s government.”
Khan at that time blamed his expulsion on a conspiracy between the opposition and the United States because of its growing cooperation with the Russian and Chinese governments, a claim that US officials denied. He insisted that he would not stand by the results of the vote and that the whole process had been “discredited” and “completely deteriorated”.
Since then, he has been campaigning for the country to hold early elections and to be able to run. This has involved increasingly loud attacks against the country’s military leaders.
On Tuesday, paramilitary troops entered a court in Islamabad and arrested Khan on corruption charges, which he has denied. Pakistani officials have accused him of illegally buying land from a business tycoon while he was prime minister, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to the country’s treasury. These charges are in addition to many other pre-existing cases against Khan. There are also arrest warrants for Khan’s wife Bushra Bibi. according to CNN.
Two days later, that of the country The Supreme Court ruled that his arrest was “invalid and illegal”. and was released on bail on Friday. In a virtual speech on Saturday from his hometown of Lahore, Khan called on his supporters to continue protesting on Sunday, indicating that the unrest is far from resolved.
In this photo taken on November 1, 2022, Khan speaks as he takes part in an anti-government march in Gujranwala. Khan was shot in the foot at a political rally two days later. Photo by ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images
Pakistan is facing other major problems besides this crisis.
Khan has repeatedly dodged allegations that he won a rigged election in 2018and his tenure was far from successful, like Abbas Nasir, a Pakistani journalist, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year.
According to Nasir, Khan’s tenure in power “was defined by a disregard for civil liberties and an independent press, persecuting his opponents and ignoring the procedures of parliamentary democracy. He failed to improve the economy, inflation increased and the International Monetary Fund stopped funding after his government refused to honor its commitments.” Khan’s move toward China and Russia didn’t help either; it not only damaged Pakistan’s relationship with the United States, but also failed to economically, since “projects in the billionaires China-Pakistan Economic Corridor it remained more or less stagnant”.
However, the ruling government has not fared any better. Inflation is precipitously high, “the worst it’s ever been,” according to him Farhan Hanif Siddiqi, associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and Khan’s arrest has proven to be a serious political mistake. “Unprecedented inflation, the government can’t deliver anything, combined with the embarrassment that has come [the government’s] thus these last four days, he is enforcing Imran Khan as the savior of this country.”
The country’s next general election, whenever it is, will likely mean deciding between business as usual and “the kind of populist politics that has been popular around the world,” as Siddiqi put it.
Pakistan’s future is deeply uncertain
Regardless of what happens next, Pakistanis’ view of their military has changed dramatically, and this is likely to have an effect on the government as well. “There was a time, for example, if you compare it to the politics that Pakistan faced in the 1990s, there was a moral authority that commanded the military, and the politicians were seen as corrupt and the military would … indirect interventions. to tell the people that they are the saviors of the country,” explained Siddiqi.
The military has lost some of that luster through its own actions. “In Pakistan, the role of the military during civilian governments is two-fold: (a) to keep civilians under control, (b) to protect the reserved domains of the military,” Salman said. “The first is done by creating and breaking political parties, influencing party switching during the electoral process and parliamentary voting, as well as initiating coercive actions against political parties.” The military also owns or operates various companies in the financial sector, real state, agricultureand the fertilizer sectors, which also maneuver to protect and promote.
The Pakistani military is also supporting a number of violent actors disrupting the daily lives of civilians, particularly in Balochistan, against ethnic Baloch separatists, according to a report by the International Crisis Group. The Pakistani military has a history of supporting violent groups, including the Afghan Talibanto promote their own interests.
However, there is evidence that the military’s power is waning and that stronger democratic institutions are consolidating: after Khan’s ouster in 2022, the military could have taken over the government as it did in the past . But “the space for the military is shrinking,” Salman said, as democratic institutions consolidate a series of constitutional reforms in 2010 after the fall of Musharraf.
The only way out of Pakistan’s political crisis now is to hold elections and let the people of Pakistan decide which direction they want the country to go. Despite Khan’s popularity and the renewed energy behind his campaign, it’s more show than substance, Siddiqi said. “There is no talk of what his political program would be, what his ideological program is or what he would contribute to the people. It’s just about his personality, his personality.”
This puts Pakistani voters in the undesirable position of choosing between an entrenched and corrupt system backed by the military and a civilian populist, such as Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council. explained in a Twitter thread this week.
Torn between many conflicting opinions over the past few days.
On the one hand there is a regime that has shown flagrant disregard for the constitution and the rule of law.
On the other hand, there is a party and leader that has a history of the same.
How do you deal with this?
— Uzair Younus عُزیر یُونس (@UzairYounus) May 12, 2023
“I am a constitutionalist,” Younus wrote. “A person who longs to see the rule of law, the protection of basic liberties and the expansion of free expression in the country of my birth. But I’m torn about where I should be today.”
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