Pakistan’s military rulers
Aaj Kay Naam, February 2000
On a rural road in southern Punjab I saw an official government sign sporting a curious message. “My Dear Countrymen, Army will never disappoint you like the past.” It was signed: Pervez Musharraf.
Musharraf is the military dictator of Pakistan who, in Blairite-style, has rebranded himself as the country’s “Chief Executive”. He and his supporters are keen to present the latest army coup as something new and different, and they have proclaimed a wide-ranging agenda of social and political reform. What may be new this time around is not so much the soft sell as the fact that so many of the intelligentsia, as well as a section of the NGO leadership, is willing to buy it. Further down the social scale, scepticism is stronger – as indicated by Musharraf’s roadside appeal.
The coup was staged not, initially, in defence of the interests of Pakistanis against the increasing lawlessness of the Nawaz Sharif government, but in order to stop Nawaz Sharif from replacing Musharraf as army chief – something Sharif, as the elected prime minister, had every right to do.
Apologists for army rule (not least in the British foreign office) cite the notorious corruption of Sharif and other mainstream politicians as justification for the suspension of the constitution. But the deformations in Pakistani politics are not the result of too much but of too little democracy. Even when elected governments have been in office, the military has carefully circumscribed their field of action, and indeed pulled the plug on one after another. Many of the country’s chronic problems can be traced to its door. It has funded, promoted and armed the right wing religious factions, has been complicit in the drugs trade, and has siphoned off half the national budget for decades. The culture of patronage and corruption which Musharraf now inveighs against is very much the creation of several decades of army influence.
Now the military is aiming to micro-manage the whole of Pakistani society. Military officers have been installed at the top levels of a wide variety of institutions, from district and municipal administrations to the railways, the water and power development authority, universities, PIA, not to mention the cricket board. The army also proposes to institutionalise “economic monitoring” – ostensibly to stem tax evasion – while pursuing the classic IMF ‘restructuring’ agenda: deregulation, privatisation, globalisation. These are the policies broadly pursued by both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif; the only difference now is that the military can implement the programme without being inhibited by concerns about electoral unpopularity.
In the short run, this has meant increases in furnace oil (a staple commodity), the imposition of a general sales tax, a coming hike in railway fares, and substantial job losses across the public sector. A taste of things to come was seen at a recent protest against ‘retrenchment’ in Karachi, where the army and police baton-charged demonstrators and arrested leaders of two local political parties.
The two major political parties – the Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party and the Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League – are both exhausted and widely distrusted. Initially, apart from the PML, which the army had chucked out, only the Pakistan Labour Party unequivocally denounced the coup. Now that Musharraf has said explicitly that he will never hand over power to either Sharif or Bhutto, and any return to civilian rule has been postponed to the indefinite future, the PPP, the PML, and a number of regionally-based parties are calling for an end to military rule. Imran Khan’s Tahriq-I-Insaf has joined the right wing religious parties in calling for “accountability first, then elections”. This is echoed by a substantial section of the intelligentsia, who argue that there is no point in a return to democracy unless the army first cleanses the country of “corrupt politicians.”
Accordingly, the army has launched a high-profile “accountability” drive, and has arrested several hundred politicians from the major parties. A determined, impartial and transparent accountability drive is certainly needed in Pakistan – but that is not on offer from the military. Indeed, the military and the judiciary have been explicitly excluded from investigation. Meanwhile, accused politicians are being detained for long periods without charge and when they finally get to court they are assumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent.
These are show trials (the biggest and best publicised being the trial of deposed PM Nawaz Sharif). Although the victims are themselves some of the most rotten exploiters in Pakistani society, trials of this nature will only further brutalise the administration of ‘justice’ in Pakistan. In the course of the trial, Sharif’s lawyer was assassinated and his wife was threatened with a charge of high treason. Now that he has been found guilt of kidnapping and other serious offences, Sharif himself has been handed a life sentence.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Labour Party, one of the only political organisations to oppose the coup, is subject to increasing harassment. Its offices have been raided and its leaders imprisoned. The iron fist inside the military’s velvet glove is becoming ever more apparent.
Musharraf is being promoted, at least in the west, as a liberal secularist, but that counts for little compared to the climate among the top army leadership as a whole. Here the wind is to the right, with hard-line Islamicists rising in the army leadership. Musharraf himself has called for the uniting of all the ‘jehadi’ groups – armed right wing religious fundamentalists – under one command to prosecute the war against India in Kashmir.
Over the years of the Cold War and the conflict in Afghanistan, the army and the jehadi groups became symbiotically intertwined. In contrast, ordinary Pakistanis, when given the chance, have voted overwhelmingly against fundamentalism (the right wing religious parties have never captured more than 7% in an election). In Pakistan, popular Islamic tradition is secular and tolerant – and acerbically sceptical about the pretensions of the mullahs. That’s why the fundamentalist groups and their sponsors in the army focus so heavily on the Kashmir question, which A.R. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, aptly calls “the last refuge of the scoundrel” – in both India and
Pakistan.
Since the coup, the base of Pakistani society has been largely quiescent. People are worn down by the cycle of dictatorships and the failures of civilian politicians, not too mention the burdens of nearly a decade of economic recession. The civil society movements are disorientated by the collapse of their leadership, and the trades unions have issued only the most guarded criticisms of military rule. Nonetheless, Pakistani people have a long tradition of resistance to tyrants (they’ve already overthrown several of them), and it is only a matter of time before that tradition surfaces once again. All the locally-based social activists I spoke to made clear that they regarded the military’s designs on Pakistani society as malign. They are now preparing themselves for a long period of struggle.
Frighteningly, time is not on their side. Apart, possibly, from the Cuban missile crisis, it’s unlikely that the human race has ever been closer to experiencing a nuclear war than we are at the moment. Before the Kargil conflict in the summer of 1999, there had never been a serious conventional military war fought directly between two nuclear weapons states. And before the Pakistani coup, there had been a civilian check on the military deployment of nuclear weapons in all the countries which possessed them. In India, the right wing Hindu communalist BJP government is whipping up violent anti-Pakistani sentiment and levelling near daily threats of extermination against its neighbour. This strengthens the Islamic right within the Pakistani army (and the jihadi groups in the streets), which in turns provides a handy justification for the BJP’s drive to transform India into a militantly ‘Hindu’ society.
The two regimes are now inter-locked in a grisly dance of death. However, in both India and Pakistan, the elites tend to read their own brand of strident but insecure national chauvinism into the public at large. Because they are certainly mistaken in this assumption, there is reason to hope that the drive towards nuclear war can be stopped by the challenges bubbling up from below.
