Pakistan’s Politics: Ups & Downs

It took more than three weeks for the Pakistani people after the February 8 general elections to have a new government in place. Leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Shehbaz Sharif, 72, has the job for the second time. At the time the parliament was dissolved in August in preparation of the next election, Sharif was heading the government. Since the elections did not give a clear mandate in the 342-member national Assembly to any single party, Sharif cobbled together a coalition of six constituents, including the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), even as the opposition groups chanted “vote-thief”, reasserting their claim that the February polls were rigged.  

Repeat innings are also not new. Sharif’s elder brother Nawaz Sharif, now 74, has recorded three non-consecutive spells as prime minister. This time, too, he might have wanted to sit in the coveted chair for the fourth time but his younger sibling is considered to have a better rapport with the powerful military that has staged several coups since independence in 1947. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Tahreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) is the single-largest force in a parliament with no individual party obtaining clear majority. Khan is serving jail sentence on a number of charges he relentlessly rejects as “politically motivated”. He addressed his supporters from jail with a defiant note, setting the tone for his organisation and supporters.   

Anger & accusation

Omar Ayub Khan hailed the PTI leader and said: “They put our leaders in jail, took out election symbol, rigged the election, but we kept standing, and we will stand our ground.” The opposition can be expected to “expose” the Sharif coalition for “misdeeds” within and outside the 342-member parliament. In his acceptance speech, Sharif, said: “We were subjected to political victimisation in the past but never took any revenge.” His opponents shouted “vote thief”. As long as the PPP-PML-N partnership bonds, the present government need not worry, and dynastic politics has taken a full swing. Former Foreign Minister Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, 35, skippers the PPP. Son of the assassinated ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and two-time President Asif Ali Zardari, his political stock is high. 

Benazir’s father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was given a death sentence by hanging under the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq in 1979. More than 40 years later, a nine-member Supreme Court bench headed by the chief justice pronounced that the Bhutto did not get a fair trial. Haggling over spoils of office is nothing new in especially developing democracies. South Asia is no exception. Much time and heated discussions are held behind curtains for power sharing. The several weeks’ delay in the installation of the Sharif-led coalition in March was affected by this fact. When Benazir Bhutto was in office, her husband Zardari used to be disparaged by opponents as “Mr. 10 per cent”, imputing that he demanded commissions for state licences and business contracts. Maryam Nawaz Sharif, 50, is the Muslim majority nation’s first woman chief minister. Her province Punjab is the largest of its kind and accounts for the single-largest seats at the national assembly. She is the daughter of Nawaz Sharif.

Khan had sought IMF bailout. Sharif is doing it again, underscoring the country’s ailing economy, whose continued nosedive risks public disenchantment and political instability. Endowed with rich potential and other prospects, Pakistan could achieve economic success at an enviable level. However, faced with regular terrorist attacks and frequent government dismissal or change in leadership, the second largest nation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Among the eight SAARC members, Pakistan is recorded as being the most prone to military interventions. Nawaz Sharif served a total of more than nine years as prime minister in three innings. Although he was initially backed by the Army, he was removed by the Army on all three occasions for what is widely believed to be his penchant for asserting independence when making government decisions. At a public rally he addressed as prime minister in 2022, Imran Khan claimed that a “foreign conspiracy” was bent on ousting him from power, as some powers were not happy with his foreign policy.

It was no secret that Khan’s visit to Russia, at a time when the US-led West issued sanctions against it, greatly displeased Washington and its close allies. Shortly after the Ukraine war started, Islamabad-based Western diplomats issued a statement, urging the Pakistan’s government to condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine. Khan did not condemn Moscow and his mission in New York abstained from voting on a move at the United Nations General Assembly calling on Moscow to stop the war. Islamabad has officially announced that since 2001, Pakistan had been the target of more than 19,000 terrorist attacks, resulting in 83,000 casualties and causing damages to the economy to the tune of $126 billion. Islamabad claimed to possess “irrefutable evidence” of foreign support for the terrorism. 

Coalition longevity

PML-N and PPP have come together to create the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). If the alliance were treated as a “grand alliance” in the style of what Germany has been doing with two large parties joining hands in the seat of power, the coalition combine’s longevity in power gets ensured with a long innings. Running the country through direct military rule in the fashion of Ayub Khan (1958-69), Muhammad Yahya Khan (1969-71), Gen Zia-ul-Haq (1978-88) or Pervez Musharraf (2001-2008) is, under normal circumstance, no longer feasible or prudent for Chief of the Army Staff Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah and his successors. A better and, at times, expedient option would be to manoeuvre conditions for fresh elections from which the military maintains a professional distance. 

Given the support received in his politically lean period, Prime Minister Shehbaz will most likely visit as prime minister Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and seek their financial help to address his country’s difficult economic situation. Official trips to Beijing and Russia might also figure in his priority list. With the country’s growth rate expected to be below 2 per cent and inflation to reach nearly 25 per cent, Islamabad’s recent initiative in sending signals to New Delhi for renewed economic cooperation could fetch positive results if backed with concrete measures.  A gradual economic upswing and better employment opportunities should raise Pakistani people’s hopes that things are getting stabilised for the better, and boost Prime Minister Shehbaz’s public standing. 

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)