Since August 14, the anniversary of Pakistan’s birth as a nation, the country has been at a virtual standstill because of a war of nerves between the government and two political groups who’ve occupied the government district of Islamabad.
The two groups initially had different agendas. The Movement for Justice party, led by former cricketer Imran Khan, marched on the capital in protest at alleged mass rigging of the May 2013 general election. The Pakistan People’s Movement, led by cleric-politician Tahirul Qadri, came to stage a “revolution”. The protests have since morphed into a stand-off over whether the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, should resign or not.
The protesters have taken advantage of the government’s general insensitivity. The Sharif administration thought Mr Khan’s unrelenting demand for an audit of the elections need not be taken seriously because of his inability to substantiate his claims. Nonetheless, it accorded him some acknowledgement on the grounds that his party is the third-largest grouping in the directly-elected national assembly and leads a coalition government in the north-west province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
On the other hand, it treated Mr Qadri’s protest with contempt because his party is not a participant in Pakistan’s democratic dispensation. As such, the government believed it need not take seriously his demands that the prime minister and his younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, be charged with murder for allegedly ordering the police to open fire on Mr Qadri’s supporters outside his Lahore seminary on June 17.
The Sharif administration was convinced that neither group had enough support from other political parties or the general public to be a genuine threat to its authority and that the protests would quickly run out of steam. In both cases, it has since been proven that the government underestimated the extent to which the protests’ leaders would be prepared to go.
What they lacked in substance was quickly made up for in terms of brinkmanship. It mattered not that Mr Khan’s “freedom march” attracted only a tiny fraction of the one million people he had claimed would participate, or that Mr Qadri’s “revolution” was made up exclusively of his devotees. That lack of substance has been more than made up for by the protests’ leaders resort to falsehoods, abusive language and, ultimately, violence.
Initially, what mattered was their ability to secure round-the-clock coverage from Pakistan’s two dozen 24/7 cable news channels. The media has been anything but objective, with three of the top five channels consistently fuelling the crisis by spreading dangerous rumours and playing the role of leak-enabler for anybody with an axe to grind. The manipulative elements within the media succeeded in creating the perception that it wouldn’t take much to force the government out of office.
However, the longer the stalemate has persisted and the greater the extent of the protesters’ contempt for the law and the country’s constitutional bodies, the greater the suspicion that the protesting politicians and their supporters within the media have been acting as proxies for the intelligence services of the military, which has ruled Pakistan directly for half its existence and remains beyond constitutional accountability. That’s because events have unfolded in a manner reminiscent of those leading to previous coups.
A marked effort has been made here not to engage in the semantics of the situation, because the behaviour of all participants, overt or covert, has been to the detriment of Pakistan and its long-suffering inhabitants. To do so would be tantamount to becoming a participant in the continuing brinkmanship.
Instead, here are a few observations. Irrespective of their identity, individual or institutional, each participant interest group has treated Pakistan’s political stage as their exclusive fiefdom and its 180 million-plus people as serfs. None of them has shown any regard for the greater national or public interest. Nor have they deigned to offer any solutions to the multitude of crises that plague Pakistan. Instead, there have been incessant, competing rants of “me, mine and my infallibility”.
They seem oblivious to the fact that they are an embarrassment to Pakistan’s citizens and the country’s closest allies and have done more damage to the nation’s interests than its many overseas detractors have by design.
The damage goes far beyond that, however. As the very few “haves” of Pakistan’s body-politic have slugged it out for the world to see, the many, many “have-nots” have been given further reason – if they needed any – to conclude they have no stake in the country and need to look elsewhere to secure access to the requisite components of a life with human dignity.
This is the reason why many impoverished members of society are convinced they have a right to turn to crime as a legitimate means of making a living. And it’s why many Pakistanis, given the choice and means, would choose to leave the country for good.
Tom Hussain is a freelance journalist and political analyst based in Islamabad.