October has the dubious distinction of being the month in Pakistan’s history in which the democratic order was uprooted twice. On October 8, 1958, Iskandar Mirza, Pakistan’s first president, clamped the first countrywide martial law by abrogating the 1956 constitution and dismissing prime minister Feroz Khan Noon.
Three weeks later, on October 27, Mirza himself was booted out by Army Chief General Ayub Khan, through whom martial law was enforced. Four decades later, on October 12, 1999, General Pervez Musharraf pulled down democracy by dismissing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Between Mirza and Sharif, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was toppled by General Ziaul Haq on July 5, 1977. Zia subsequently led the country’s longest military regime.
Mirza, Bhutto and Zia were undone by their handpicked generals. Ayub Khan was appointed commander-in-chief on January 17, 1951 by prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan on the recommendation of the then defence secretary Iskandar Mirza. Before his appointment, Khan was the most junior major-general and was promoted out of turn.
Zia was made chief on March 1, 1976 by Bhutto. He was the most junior on the list of lieutenant generals, having been promoted barely a year ago. The next military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, at the time of his appointment as army chief on October 6, 1998, was third in line. However, Sharif, like Bhutto, set aside the principle of seniority.
Such analogies have given rise to a widespread view that while appointing Ayub Khan, Ziaul Haq, or Pervez Musharraf as army chief, if the appointing authority (president or prime minister) had shown better judgment, the applecart of democracy would not have been upset and Pakistan would have been a much stronger democracy than it is today.
Does such a view carry any substance? Is the process of historical development so sensitive that an error of judgment can put it on a different track? Are the forces shaping the course of political evolution so weak as to be swayed by the decisions of one person, no matter how important a position they may hold?
The answer to such questions depends on how one sees the relationship between human and history. Men and women, by their choices, make history – and how the people holding the reins of a nation think and decide shape its destiny. So goes one view.
The counterview is that these choices and decisions themselves are determined by the interplay of impersonal social forces: economic, political, cultural. The spirit of the age, to borrow a famous phrase from the philosopher Hegel, working through individuals but independent of their volition, may steer a people towards glory and regeneration or it may drag them to decadence, degeneration and decline.
Without committing oneself to answering the question one way or the other, one can safely say that any analysis which ascribes the success or failure of states or nations to the competence or incompetence of one or a few persons, without taking into account the social forces at work, is shallow and superficial.
By the same token, any analytical account of military intervention in politics, if it is to be plausible, needs to consider the prevailing social milieu and the moment instead of attributing it to an error of judgment on the part of the decision-makers. The latter explanation implies that such crucial events could be averted merely by promoting the ‘right’ person.
In point of fact, this is how the person in power thinks and selects a ‘loyal’, ‘less ambitious’ person for the office, often with disastrous consequences. As the country’s history bears out, the only effective bulwark against military intervention is strong and stable institutions backed by the people, who have high stakes in their preservation and growth.
Let’s apply this logic to the issue at hand, namely the imposition of military rule in Pakistan from time to time, which has followed a definite pattern.
While the ‘grave threats’ posed to national security by an ‘incompetent’ or ‘corrupt’ civilian leadership, as claimed by the coup makers, may be more of a fiction than a fact, it can’t be disputed that military intervention is generally preceded by considerable political instability or uncertainty.
Take the first countrywide martial law, which was clamped in October 1958. Between 1950 and 1958, the country passed through severe political uncertainty and saw seven prime ministers, one after another. As a result of party instability, coalitions were formed and broken off and on. Despite their infighting, the major political parties agreed on one thing: that Mirza wouldn’t be re-elected president, regardless of the fact that he still held all the aces.
The end of the Ayub rule also did not owe to the ambition of his successor in the army house. It’s not that one fine morning Gen Agha Muhammad Yahya went to president Ayub and asked him to step down. Before Yahya could come out with such advice, Ayub had been enormously weakened by the Bhutto-led political movement that cashed in on the ‘flawed’ Pak-India Tashkent Agreement as well as people’s discontent with the regime’s policies, which had concentrated economic power in just a few hands.
Likewise, Gen Zia’s ouster of the civilian order on July 5, 1977 came about amid violent agitations by the opposition Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) in the wake of ‘heavily rigged’ elections. Well before the nation had gone to the polls, Bhutto had earned the antagonism of world powers for presiding over a fundamental shift in the country’s foreign policy as well as of the domestic business community for having nationalised key industries. The establishment, which didn’t trust Bhutto, capitalised on the volatile situation.
True, Nawaz Sharif’s ouster on October 12, 1999 was not preceded by a popular political movement. Yet developments that took place over the preceding couple of years had made the end of the civilian rule highly probable. First, the prime minister, drawing upon a heavy mandate, fought with the president and the chief justice of Pakistan and forced both to go home.
Then he took on the powerful army chief of the time and made him step down, thus knocking out three of the four principal power players. The government’s attempts to normalise relations with India and the ensuing Kargil war drove a wide wedge between the political and non-political players. The system had reached its breaking point. Only a catalyst was needed to give it the final push, which Sharif himself provided when he sacked his hand-picked army chief.
Military intervention is welcomed, if not sought, by disgruntled politicians, who see in it the only opportunity to settle a score with their rivals. Recall how in 2014 Imran Khan pinned his hopes on the army to send Sharif packing. To top it all, there is little popular resentment to the ouster of the civilian setup; rather, in the beginning, the change is welcomed by the people by and large, in the hope that finally things would get better. The last nail in the coffin of civilian rule is fixed by the judiciary when it legitimises army intervention.
Alternative explanations of past events are at best speculative. We can’t go back in time and see whether the situation would be different if another person was appointed on each occasion when democracy was derailed. However, considering the social forces at play, the intervention would hardly have been averted.
The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist. He tweets/posts hussainhzaidi and can be reached at: hussainhzaidigmail.com