Lost opportunities

Islamabad diary

When the military began its drive against the Pakistani variant of jihadism – embodied by the TTP, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan – there was a hope, admittedly a slim one, that Pakistan could, to some extent, reinvent itself.

The hope entertained by gullible folks like me was that along with military success against jihadism there would be an impetus for social reform. The army would first reform itself. With the blood of its martyrs– and there was no shortage of those – it would wash away the real-estate fondness, or call it obsession, of its senior-most echelons. There would be no more defence housing authorities, no more billboards extolling the wonderful lifestyles on offer in those protected enclaves.

In other words, the army would become, to the exclusion of everything else, a fighting army and leave commerce and real estate to worthier hands.

Thus cleansed and indeed purified the army, without upsetting the democratic applecart, would push for accountability and reform. The Model Town massacre would be investigated. The Asghar Khan case would be pushed to its logical conclusion. The National Accountability Bureau would be freed from the clutches of party loyalists like its present chairman and be made to act like an independent body. The blood of the martyrs would be complemented by this agenda of internal reform.

In the course of Zarb-e-Azb the army, and to some extent the air force which was there in the fight from the first day, acquired great prestige and moral authority. The army’s previous history of coups and the fostering of the very jihadism it was now fighting were forgotten. Not the political class which felt threatened by the moral ascendancy of the army but the nation at large looked at the army through new eyes.

Pakistani-style jihadism received severe blows in the insurgency-infested tribal areas. In the south a new leaf was turned in Karachi, the politics of violence and extortion brought under control and normal life returning to Pakistan’s largest city, its only seaport and centre of commerce and industry. This seemed to be the beginning, the expectation arising – again in the hearts and souls of gullible souls like me – that this process of cleansing would not remain confined to Karachi but would spread to other spaces of the republic.

This has proved a forlorn hope. If the opportunity for national cleansing ever existed it has now gone. There was a moment, an all too evanescent moment, when army prestige stood high and the political class looked as if the colour had been drained from its collective cheeks. That moment is no longer there and it is back to the politics of the usual and the predictable. The shaken morale of the political class seems largely to have been restored.

Two things the army could never bring itself to do: a) rid itself of its real-estate obsession, the cancer of DHA-ism now spreading even to smaller cantonments; and b) cut its links once and for all with jihadi outfits dedicated (ostensibly) to the liberation of Kashmir.

The army is Pakistan’s most organised institution, dwarfing in size and effectiveness all others. Pakistan can never undertake the journey of social reform unless this most powerful of institutions is in the forefront of this effort. But this can never happen unless the army frees itself from the profit-motive of real-estate commercialism and cuts its lingering links with Kashmir jihadism.

To the drive for army-led reform we can give the generic name Kemalism. This and DHAs don’t go together. This and the confused flirtation with jihad don’t go together.

You may well ask: if the army is so handicapped why doesn’t the political class undertake the cause of recasting Pakistan’s foundations? This is easier said than done. The political class, most of it, or perhaps all of it at this juncture, is all cant and humbug – false talk and false promises. It is not interested in social reform. The status quo, Pakistan as it is – Pakistan with all its corruption and inefficiency – suits the political class because it is amongst the major beneficiaries of the status quo. Why should it upend its own interests?

The working class – as an organised, pressure-wielding body – is finished. There is no organised peasantry and never will be in the lands that constitute this Fortress of Islam. (Why has this term, once so bandied about, fallen into disfavour?) The lumpen proletariat of the cities living on the margins of existence are prone to riot and disorder when occasion arises, like an unforeseen incident. But it is incapable of organised action. The mosque and seminary brigade is a power in the land but its instinctive agenda is to keep the country mired in backward and reactionary thinking.

Pakistani politics thus presents a strange sight today. There are rightwing parties and then extreme rightwing parties until we reach the very end of the rightwing spectrum. But there are no leftist parties, none that have a presence on the ground and, since the PPP’s reimaging at the hands of Asif Ali Zardari, not even a left-of-centre party. That leftist space lies completely vacant.

The commanding heights of politics are occupied by the super-rich class. Waderas used to be from the feudal class. Today we have landed waderas, as in the PPP, and commercial-cum-industrial waderas as in the PML-N. The PTI is the putative alternative to these parties. It too, Allah be praised, is led by the super-rich league. Call this the triumph of Pakistani democracy.

This system was in danger of packing up under the assault of TTP jihadism. Only the army was capable of meeting this threat but the army had lost heart and was in no mood to fight. Things only changed when under a new command the army finally bestirred itself and looked to the danger threatening the country.

Pakistan becoming Iraq or Syria…this may seem far-fetched today but it looked a close enough possibility just last year. Pakistan was saved from itself, from its own weaknesses…and the hope arose, in the hearts of fools, that this could be a turning point for the nation’s fortunes.

That hope stands belied. The army’s star rose to its zenith and is now dipping towards the horizon. The political class is back in the saddle. Call this the revived triumph of Pakistani democracy.

So we are in for uneventful times. Or it is back to business as usual. Other forces have also come into play. The money pouring into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is creating new facts on the ground – highways, motorways, polluting coal plants, money skimmed off from these projects, super-fat commissions, etc. This means the strengthening of Pakistan’s capitalist-led democracy. The army meanwhile will be managing security for the Chinese working on these projects. A whole new army division is being raised for this purpose.

A super-rich class, an expanding middle class and tens of millions steeped in poverty. This has been India’s journey and it seems to be Pakistan’s destiny too.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com