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“Three Phases” By Cyril Almeida

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“May God bless that poor woman and keep her safe. She has suffered enough. The rest of us, our suffering in this third phase of Pakistan’s history may just be beginning.”

PHASE one was state construction and finding ties to bind a new nation. Roughly between 1947 and 1958, when the political class was quickly overtaken and subjugated by a military and bureaucratic elite in the permanent state. Religion was quickly identified as the binding tie with potential in a country of diverse people and political histories.

Phase two began in the late 1970s. Three events in relatively quick succession that took the militarised and bureaucratised state and the experimentation with religious nationalism in the first three decades to the next level. The three events: the Zia coup and his Islamisation drive; the Iranian revolution just as petrodollars were turbocharging regional politics; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the Cold War overhang.

For at least two decades since the late 1970s, much of what Pakistan did or responded to stemmed from a combination of the three events layered on top of the original militarised and bureaucratised state and the experimentation with religious nationalism. There is no authoritative tome on that phase because we haven’t produced a world-class historian or political scientist since to write the book. There lies its own tale of sorrow.

The first contradiction is rooted in the second war in Afghanistan. If we helped the mujahideen defeat the Soviets, then how can we help the Americans fight the Taliban, drawn from the same inspiration as the mujahideen? Both wars can’t be right, and we’ve never had the courage to say the first one was wrong.

May God bless that poor woman and keep her safe. She has suffered enough. The rest of us, our suffering in this third phase of Pakistan’s history may just be beginning.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1443480/the-third-phase

 

Imran Khan is only a player in the circus run by Pakistan’s military

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Written by :Fatima Bhutto.(The Guardian)

Shared by : Syed Ehtisham

As the nation elects its next leader, it is a tragedy that such hopeful people are offered this glut of shoddy candidates.

In the run-up to Wednesday’s elections in Pakistan, hard-pressed attempts at democracy seem to have given way to a fully-fledged circus. We have powerful, all-knowing ringmasters, caged lions, knife-throwers, trapeze artists flying from perch to perch, even cruelty to animals is included. Ours is a circus which looks to be performing its last show before it shuts down – evidenced most clearly by its last act, the clown. The political record of the former cricket star Imran Khan, who is thought to be near to victory due to the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, has long been one of opportunism and obeisance.

In 2006, he voted against the women’s protection bill, an amendment to the grotesque Hudood Ordinances, which jail a woman for the crime of pre-marital sex or adultery. As a consequence, allegations of rape are nearly impossible to prove unless the victim can call upon four upstanding men who witnessed the exact moment of rape. Without those witnesses, it was often the victim, not the rapist, who found herself behind bars. The 2006 amendment only did away with the requirement of witnesses; which would have allowed a woman who said she had been raped to be taken at her word and given the right to file a police case and have a rape test administered in a hospital. Khan voted no. He has defended Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, hascalled for the military’s gargantuan share of the national budget to remain untouched, declared that feminism degrades motherhood, attracted an army of online trolls who send death threats to his critics, and most recently welcomed the support of Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who reportedly founded the militant organisation Harkatul Mujahideen, was reportedly an associate of Osama bin Laden and remains on a US terror watchlist.

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Khan’s morally flexible manifesto is sadly not unique. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is billed as an anticorruption party, yet it has welcomed droves of allegedly corrupt people from the Pakistan People’s Party, an Olympic-level bunch of looters and thieves, and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), who have long flatlined the aspirations of their people. The Ahle Sunnat Wa Jammat is a sectarian hate group that calls for the murder of Shia Muslims. Not only have they been openly participating in the elections, they have also endorsed candidates belonging to all the major parties –no one has refused their support.

The few young independents or dynamic voices that exist in this overwhelming arena of the bad and the ugly are continually hounded and menaced for their lonely acts of bravery. It is Pakistan’s supreme tragedy that such a young, hopeful, promising people are offered this glut of shoddy candidates.

While none of Khan’s misogyny, cuddling up to the military and his militant affection is new to anyone who has watched his career, this election campaign has certainly been disturbing for its displays of cruelty. On 17 July, PTI supporters in Karachi tied a donkey to a pole. They punched its face till its jaw broke, ripped open its nostrils, and drove a car into its body, leaving the animal to collapse, having been beaten to within an inch of his life. Before they left, they wrote ‘Nawaz’ (the name of the former prime minister) into its flesh, seemingly inspired by their leader, Imran Khan, who has taunted PML-N workers as ghaddhay or donkeys. The donkey was rescued by the ACF Animal Rescue team, a private organisation, who noted that, even days later, it could not stand up on its own because of the ferocity of its torture. It soon succumbed to its injuries, an innocent creature beaten to death for entertainment.

A day later, another donkey in Karachi was mercilessly attacked, this time the skin on its face was ripped off, the flesh on its forehead torn apart till all that remained between its eyes was a pulpy, bloody hole. The ACF did not say whether the animal was a victim of the same party but, in a landscape of venomous online trolling, people are afraid to say very much these days. In Sarghoda on 20 July, the PTI brought two sloth bears to an election rally and forced them to dance to their turgid campaign songs. The bears were dressed in PTI colours and their handlers stood nearby, controlling them with lathisand rope threaded through their snouts.

Pakistan is a country afflicted by unremitting violence – the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz called us a “congregation of pain” –and this election alone has seen three devastating suicide blasts targeting candidates. But the PTI supporters’ particular brand of savagery, seemingly incited by thoughtless, debasing rhetoric, strikes many as yet one more troubling sign of what is to come. This political culture of vulgar triumphalism will always require victims to publicly humiliate, the more helpless the better.

Khan would be wise to learn from history and note that his nemesis Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister and head of the PML-N party, jailed in the weeks before the election on corruption charges, was once an army man himself. Sharif began his political career as a protege of the same military dictator who cheered Khan’s cricket victories, General Zia ul Haq. The same institution that once carried Sharif upon its shoulders has hunted him down and locked him up.

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The Art Of Capturing The People’s Mandate

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A chronological history of systematic subversion of Pakistani people’s mandate.

Written by : Dr. Nazzir Mahmood(The News July 28, 20180)

Shared by : Mirza Ashraf

In the seven decades of Pakistan’s existence, at least seven strategies or tactics have been developed in the country to capture or steal people’s mandate.
These tactics – or tools if you will – have been used with various degrees of success in the past 70 years, but one common feature among them is that most of these tools were perfected in the 1950s and then used again and again in each succeeding decade. So, what exactly are these tactics that have been so useful and how people keep falling prey to them?
First, topple the government or its leader without resorting to any no-confidence motion. This tool was first used within the very first week of Pakistan’s creation when the elected government of Dr Khan Saheb in the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was removed without a no-confidence motion. It is an established practice that if a national or provincial government needs to be removed, the opposition introduces a no-confidence motion and if the ruling leader or party does not have enough support in the concerned assembly, they lose the confidence vote. This is the legal and constitutional way of removing a government or its leader.
The removal of Dr Khan was not the last such episode. In fact, this engendered a plethora of such removals from both the centre and the provinces. The chief ministers of East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh were repeatedly removed at the behest of the central government. You will find not a couple, but dozens of such incidents in the history of Pakistan. The names are too many to cite here, but from Dr Khan, Ayub Khuhro and Fazlul Haq to the Bhuttos and the Sharifs, there is a long list of leaders whose mandate was captured or stolen.
Second, call them traitors and deprive them of their popular support. For this, a leader or a party does not need to be a popular leader across Pakistan. If you are a provincial or regional leader, or you are not likely to win many seats in the elections, even then you can be labelled a traitor. The condition is that you must deviate from the dominant narrative. If that narrative is of hatred and religious discord, you just need to talk about peace and harmony and you qualify to be a traitor.
Perhaps the first leader to be declared a traitor was Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and then there is a long line of them: Molvi Fazlul Haq, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Suhrawardy, Fatima Jinnah, the Bhuttos, down to the Sharifs. All these leaders have carried the proud stigma of being a traitor at various times. This tool is useful against big, medium and small-scale leaders alike. Even if your party or leader is not likely to win a couple of seats in elections, your defiant mood and questioning nature can deprive you of whatever meagre public support you command.
Third, create a conspiracy case. If declaring a traitor doesn’t do the trick, go a step further and concoct a conspiracy case that can substantiate allegations of treason. Be it the Rawalpindi, Agartala and Hyderabad conspiracy cases or the airplane high-jacking case, all have been used to prove that those who differ from the dominant power – civilian or military – run a risk of being involved in a conspiracy against the state. The hollowness of these cases can be gauged from the fact that even after being convicted in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, Faiz Ahmed Faiz still commanded people’s respect. The Agartala and Hyderabad conspiracy cases were abolished by Gen Ayub Khan and Gen Ziaul Haq respectively, when they outlived their utility. The airplane high-jacking case died its own death when Nawaz was exiled.
Fourth, physically eliminate the leader. Liaquat Ali Khan was perhaps the first leader of a national stature who was eliminated in this fashion. Irrespective of what wrongs he committed, Liaquat Ali Khan was the leader of the house and commanded majority support. Though the real conspiracy behind his assassination was never fully disclosed, those who benefitted the most from his elimination included Malik Ghulam Mohammad, Iskandar Mirza and Gen Ayub Khan; all three of them became the heads of state one after the other. In the presence of Liaquat Ali Khan, perhaps none of them could have been elevated to such a lofty position.
Be it the judicial murder of Z A Bhutto or the terrorist attack on Benazir Bhutto, they deprived people of their favourite leaders. But physical elimination is not done by assassination alone. You can also exile a leader for 10 years like Nawaz Sharif, or put him/her behind bars for a long time such as Asif Zardari. Those who do all of this are never answerable in any court, even if the cases against those assassinated, incarcerated or exiled are highly controversial and lack any semblance of judicial accuracy. You may also capture the mandate just by creating an atmosphere in which leaders’ safety is always under threat.
Fifth, you may steal peoples’ mandate by abrogating laws and writing your own constitution. Ghulam Mohammad used his own interpretation of the law and the federal court stamped it for him. Maj Gen Iskandar Mirza abrogated the first constitution that had come into being after almost a decade. Gen Ayub Khan formed a constitutional commission of judges but then ultimately wrote his own constitution, promulgated in 1962 and arrogated all powers to himself, thus depriving people of their mandate for over a decade. Gen Yahya Khan abrogated the 1962 constitution and gave his own legal framework order.
Gen Ziaul Haq and Gen Musharraf mutilated the constitution so much that it took decades to restore some of its original countenance, though a portion of it is still bleeding and mauled. But this was not done by dictators alone. Even Z A Bhutto made changes to the constitution that have had a lasting impact on the minorities. Nawaz Sharif in his 1990s’ incarnations made such loathsome changes to the constitution that it started resembling a document from the Middle Ages. In this disenfranchisement of large segments of society, the judiciary was hand-in-glove.
Sixth, to capture the mandate you can use the media to your heart’s content to tell the people that the leaders they love are a worthless bunch of crooks or nincompoops. The print media was used effectively against the second prime minister of Pakistan, Khawaja Nazimuddin in the early 1950s. Then both the print and electronic media were used against Fatima Jinnah. After toppling Z A Bhutto, a series of programmes were shown on PTV that maligned Bhutto and his family. In the 1990s, the media was again used against the Bhuttos, when the Sharifs were relatively favoured.
Finally, the seventh tactic, or tool, to capture people’s mandate is to simply manipulate the elections. Perhaps the first such practice was used against Mirza Ibrahim, then on a massive scale against Fatima Jinnah in the 1960s. This manipulation can range from installing outright hostile caretaker governments, such as Ghulam Ishaq Khan did when in 1990 he made Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi the caretaker prime minister while the latter was stiffly against Benazir Bhutto, or installing Jam Sadiq Ali as caretaker chief minister of Sindh who surpassed all levels of indecency against Benazir Bhutto and her party, which enjoyed popular support at the time. So much so, that the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad had to be created to capture the mandate.

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Don’t be shocked if Imran Khan does not win next election!

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Worth reading analysis in Dawn. Next election is a fateful election for Pakistan. If Imran Khan loses and PML-N wins, it will bring the confrontation to forehead between Nawaz Party and Army plus Judiciary. f.sheikh

AND they are off! The front runner has been turbo-charged by the racing club management that has hobbled the next horse. Bringing up the rear is a thoroughbred that has seen better times, but is now way past its peak.

This scenario is what we see from the echo chamber that much of our media has become. But the other day as I was flipping channels, I came across an interesting two-part interview with Dr Ijaz Gilani, founder and chairman of Gallup Pakistan.

I was so fascinated by the facts and figures he discussed that I watched the programme online the next day so I could take notes. Relying on data from all the elections held in Pakistan from 1970 onwards, he made the point that while there had been rigging against the PPP in the 1988 and 1993 polls, it was no longer possible to doctor the results on election day.

Another point Dr Gilani made was that while only 15 per cent of voters were influenced by the personal appeal of leaders, 85pc of them voted for parties. This would seem to minimise the impact of Imran Khan’s undeniable charisma. In terms of personal popularity, Gallup Pakistan’s findings are that Nawaz Sharif leads Imran Khan by 50pc to 45pc.

The figures reveal that we are talking about two Pakistans.

Overall, the PTI’s support has increased from 17pc in the 2013 elections to 25pc in the most recent Gallup poll. In the same period, the PML-N has gone up from 33pc to 38pc. The PPP remains stagnant at around 15pc.

But it is in Punjab that the gap between the two top parties is widest: Gallup Pakistan puts the PML-N far ahead with a 20pc lead over PTI. This difference, if translated into assembly seats, would almost certainly make PML-N the biggest parliamentary party, and therefore in the best position to form the next government. In KP, the PTI’s appeal has risen, while PPP continues to dominate in rural Sindh. Karachi has become extremely volatile, with voter intentions changing from day to day.

When Gallup Pakistan published its forecast before the 2013 elections, placing the PTI far behind PML-N, Imran Khan dismissed the polling organisation as politically motivated. But Dr Gilani’s outfit has been remarkably accurate in predicting the results in 2008 and 2013.

Political forecasters have earned a bad name following Donald Trump’s surprise win in 2016, and the shock victory of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. But in terms of the popular vote, pollsters had Hilary Clinton ahead by a large margin; in the event, she received nearly three million more votes than Trump, only to be defeated in the electoral college.

If Dr Gilani’s numbers turn out to be accurate in the coming elections, what will it mean for Imran Khan? Will we have to endure another five years of destabilising rigging charges, appeals, court cases, long marches and sit-ins? Should Imran Khan fail to achieve his dream of becoming prime minister again, despite all the help he has allegedly received from the establishment, his frustration will know no bounds.

Just as relevant is the question of what a PML-N victory will mean for an establishment that has tried every trick in the book to prevent the party’s victory by a concerted campaign to blacken Nawaz Sharif’s name. But even after he was unseated as prime minister on flimsy grounds, his party remains popular in Punjab. And as we have noted earlier, 85pc of voters cast their ballots for a party, and not a leader.

These polling figures also underline what some of us have said before: allegations of corruption do not greatly influence voters, most of whom look at the performance of local politicians as well as their parties. And here, the PML-N is widely perceived to have delivered in Punjab.

So why this huge gap between the perceptions of actual voters and the chattering classes who inhabit the bubble created by TV chat shows? Dr Gilani has an explanation: according to his data, 70pc of those polled indicate that they are satisfied that Pakistan is headed in the right direction. This is in stark contrast to the media babble about doom and gloom, and how we are in freefall.

Clearly, then, we are talking about two Pakistans here: one comprising around 10pc of the population that consists of the educated middle class with high aspirations, and the vast majority of people who are relatively poor, but who want a better life for their children. Unsurprisingly, it is this second group that ultimately decides the outcome of elections. For them, elections are the only means for their voices to be heard, and they vote in large numbers.

All this is undoubtedly bad news for our political engineers who need to internalise the lessons hard numbers teach us. Wishful thinking, not backed by data and rigorous analysis, is not enough to base strategy on. Luckily, Dr Gilani has provided us with both.

Memo to PTI trolls: Please don’t shoot the messenger.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1410116/the-numbers-game

irfan.husain@gmail.com