In the eye of a gathering storm

Few excuses represent cowardliness more robustly than the attempts by some in our midst to blame atrocities like the murder of Mashal Khan on a military dictator that was blown to smithereens almost thirty years ago. This is not to deny that the Zia era helped formalise and institutionalise petro-sunstroke into our constitutional and legal norms. However, the responsibility for what happened in Mardan rests squarely with us. Here. Today. Now.

Cowardly attitudes to moments of great tragedy or great glory are almost always reflective of larger social and political ills. We duck and dive to evade a serious conversation about violent extremism in the name of our faith because so many people have already been killed for trying, and so many others have been banished from their homes and homeland. Javed Ghamidi can talk to Pakistanis, but only via video link. The judge that convicted Mumtaz Qadri of pre-meditated murder can live, but only in anonymity and outside the geographical boundaries of this fortress of Islam. There is a larger dynamic that fuels this systemic, society-wide cowardice. It is multifaceted and complex, but it includes the concurrent collapse of confidence in institutions and the absence of an honest appraisal of class as a critical informant of political, religious and social identity.

On the surface, all this may not matter much to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his family, but it is more intimately linked to them than it would seem. The Supreme Court judgment in the Panama case will be interpreted many ways, and dissected a million times, but the immediate damage it has done to PM Sharif and his standing is immeasurable. An intelligent discussion inside the PM’s inner circle would revisit the extent to which this damage has been self-inflicted – but such discussions tend to drown quickly when the Sharifs lend themselves as readily as they do to being marinated in sycophantic delusions about their invincibility and brilliance.

By fumbling his response to the Panama leaks from day one, the prime minister has created a widespread impression of culpability and guilt, regardless of the technical prosecutability of the argument against him. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) that the Supreme Court has constituted is both an epic blow to the highest office in the country, and also a Crying Jordan moment for those of us invested in the capability of the Pakistani state. We should know the exact constitution of the JIT by Thursday, but the mere fact that the learned judges have deemed BPS 19 officers to be capable of conducting an international and intergenerational investigation of a sitting prime minister in sixty days speaks to the vast disconnect between our expectations from the Pakistani state, and its limited, constrained and shrinking capabilities.

Everybody knows that the Sharifs do not have a robust paper trail for their wealth – but few believe that a smoking gun can be found linking their wealth to a provable crime. And so the moth-eaten legitimacy of the prime minister will continue to be vulnerable to clever quotes from popular culture. Perhaps the JIT report may choose to quote Lt John McClane of the New York Police Department from any of the various Die Hard films: they all use the same quote to capture the essence of what a desperate man does, when faced with a gathering storm, he yells “Yippee ki-yay…” and hopes for the best.

There is supposed to be a general election in Pakistan within the next calendar year. The gathering storm that PM Sharif faces has four distinct dimensions within this restricted timeframe. The first, most urgent and most obvious, is the ultimate fallout from the Panama case, including but not limited to what the JIT finds and recommends to the Supreme Court. The second is the ongoing census and the disruptive potential of what we learn about the country from the census for the electoral map and demographic reality of the country. The third is the emerging threat posed by extremism, not just to national security but to rule of law and the joint efforts of civilian and military powers to re-establish Jinnahist norms in the country. And finally, the pressure Pakistan faces, both positive and negative, from external actors.

The Panama case is, in many ways, the simplest of the four eyes of the storm. At best, by the end of the JIT process, PM Sharif will be left with the stench of compromised moral authority. This does not have decisive electoral relevance, but it does affect his capacity to govern and deliver. The last twelve months are ample proof of this. A prime minister consumed by mounting a defence of his name, and his family’s name, is a prime minister distracted from his other job, the one he was voted in to do: to be prime minister. Pakistani voters may not be as forgiving of a slacker.

The census, overdue by a decade, is finally underway. Most experts believe two things about the census, to the point of near certainty. First, that the population has grown significantly and so there are more Pakistanis than we may have thought there are. Second, that the rate of growth of our cities has been faster than the rate of growth of our villages. If the census fulfils expert expectations, then the quantum of high density, high population urban areas will have increased and intensified, and this will produce the obvious outcome from an elections perspective: a demand for more seats in the assemblies, and a demand for the remapping of constituencies. In every scenario imaginable, there will be some parties that will be clear winners, and some that are clear losers.

The losers are easier to identify. A dramatic shift in Karachi’s demographics is likely to penalise the MQM and reward the ANP, the PTI and perhaps some religious groups. More urban than rural seats will harm the PPP and reward some of its competitors. In Balochistan, the Pakhtun versus Baloch dynamic will assume new urgency. Perhaps most important of all, however, will be the fate of the Punjabi city. One early, though unsubstantiated, estimate for Lahore’s population pegs it at more than double the current estimate. What would this mean for the chances of the PTI in constituencies that it lost by a thinner than 30,000 margin? What would a ten percent change in the turnout mean for those constituencies? After Panama, it is the fate of constituency dynamics in Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Multan, and Gujranwala that keeps the Sharifs up at night. As it should.

The Mashal Khan lynching is one of several manifestations of extremism in society. More significant is the growing muscularity and assertiveness of right-wing malcontents. Those that fashion themselves as stewards of public morality have a wider and deeper audience than ever before. Part of this is a response to unprocessed modernity and intergenerational drift. Part of it is a wider, more global rightward drift. But PM Sharif has bet on himself as an upholder of Jinnahist values, investing in pluralistic symbols designed to promote an inclusive and tolerant ethos. The right-wing counter-attack is building, and it will be buoyed by stains left by Mossack Fonseca.

Finally, there is the international dimension. China wants swift and problem-free CPEC progress. America wants more than what it has gotten. India wants Pakistan to be bad enough to distract everyone from India. Afghanistan will continue to radiate toxicity. And the Iran-Saudi Arabia contest will continue apace. Some of the behaviours of these actors will produce externalities for PM Sharif to deal with. From Ufa to Uri, and from Sharbat Gula to Rouhani-Gate, he has struggled to weave an intricate and difficult balance. It is only going to get more turbulent.

Each of these issues has institutional champions within the country that will naturally convene towards challenging the elected civilian government of PM Sharif. The judiciary, the army and the various political actors, both pro and anti Sharif, all have major stakes in the outcome of the JIT, in the country’s changing demography, in the survival of pluralism and in the successful conduct of foreign relations. A desperate man in the eye of a gathering storm, PM Sharif will need to do better than “yippee ki-yay”.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.