Three little words…Mahir Ali
UNITY, faith, discipline: it would generally be agreed that Pakistans motto has broadly been more honoured in the breach than the observance throughout the past 75 years. Disunity and indiscipline have long been the norm.
Faith could be seen as an exception; given that it has proliferated in recent decades but invariably in the shape of variants that would have bewildered the founding father who coined the motto. Tellingly, in the Urdu translation, faith comes first. And, given M.A. Jinnahs legal training, its likely that by discipline, he meant adherence to the rule of law rather than military-style regimentation, let alone the unison of the mob.
Anyhow, the events of the past week seemingly transcended previous bounds of disunity and bouts of indiscipline too. At least as intriguing as the violence against visible military symbols, particularly in Punjab, was the subdued response. The Baloch have understandably been left wondering how harsh the response might have been had similar wrath been exhibited in their province, which has borne the brunt of military misrule at least since the 1960s.
The anti-military sentiment is both unusual and interesting. It is not unique, mind you. By the end of the 1960s, for instance, the field marshal who had ruled the nation for a decade was the target of considerable derision and discontent. Popular opinion also held the army in contempt for a while after the surrender of Dhaka albeit without any recognition of the allegedly egregious war crimes.
Like many other parts of Pakistans unfortunate history, that atrocious episode continues to be shrouded in obfuscation and misinformation. The general dubbed the butcher of Bengal was given the opportunity to be recast as the butcher of Balochistan from 1973 onwards. Wali Khan used to refer to the Bhutto phase in the early 1970s as a diluted democracy. That wasnt inaccurate, but there was much worse to come.
The Ziaul Haq phase of military rule deserves all the ignominy it has attracted, and maybe more. But what followed the dictators demise in the skies was also a travesty, interrupted at the cusp of the millennium by another bout of military rule, but almost seamlessly renewed thereafter.
The security establishment never let go of its trump cards, and Imran Khan and his PTI was just another one of those. But it resoundingly backfired on the traditional arbiters of the nations fate after he apparently drifted off the same page narrative he had proudly touted as a huge advantage in enabling his governance.
Now he tends to blame the army in general, and former army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa in particular, for all of the nations woes during his tenure as prime minister. In that case, shouldnt he have quit long before the no-confidence vote turfed him out of office? But then, hypocrisy is hardly a novelty. Nor is he the first prime minister to take that route.
Whats truly galling is the faith (yet another instance of the national mottos misinterpretation, perhaps) of his followers that an egoist in some mysterious way represents a break from Pakistans misbegotten past or any kind of answer to its current distress. Hes merely another element of continuity in a hopeless trajectory that didnt quite work out for his former masters or for the nation.
What he managed to do was to cultivate a personality cult; adherents unthinkingly envisage him as some kind of messiah whose ascendancy will magically transform a failing state into a miracle. The absurdity of that assumption is hard to overemphasise.
Were Imran Khan seriously interested in divesting Pakistan of its asphyxiating cloak of militocracy, he would have been less unwilling to join hands in some way with other political forces that have also borne the brunt of the establishments ascendancy in far more testing circumstances than his two days in a police rest house where the idea of toilet breaks pushed him into a paranoid panic.
That wont prevent him from winning a second term as prime minister, this time without the establishments imprimatur, but what exactly would that achieve?
A century ago, Benito Mussolini capitalised on a March on Rome to form the worlds first fascist regime. The ideology has resonated ever since. Pakistan is no stranger to fascist tendencies mostly, but not exclusively at the behest of the military.
Elections should not be postponed beyond October, and the PTI or its leader must not be excluded from them. But anyone looking upon the next elections as some kind of panacea is ultimately likely to be disappointed. The ship of state has drifted from its moorings, and no one really knows where it will land. If its not to turn into the Titanic, it needs a captain far more capable than Imran Khan.
Courtesy Dawn