Banana republic?

So the law of the land is really so wrapped up in minute technicalities that it is very easy to exploit it even when it comes to something as sacred as the constitution. It’s to protect that document that all law ultimately exists, after all, yet it turns out that if you’re desperate enough to trample upon it because you just can’t gulp a constitutional defeat, there’s a good chance you’ll get away with it too. Because apparently figuring out what just one line in one article of the constitution means requires the highest court of the country to dot Is and cross Ts forever.

Pakistan’s parliament has seen its share of dramas. But a clearly orchestrated one featuring a greatly exaggerated “threat” of regime change, complete with local links and a damning verdict of “disloyalty”, and the speaker’s chair endorsing it before batting an eyelid even as the country plunges into constitutional paralysis, has to be a first. And apparently it’s so difficult to know if the speaker broke the law or not by discarding a constitutional requirement that our elite judges, who enjoy some of the world’s best perks because they do such delicate work, need to toss and turn over it endlessly.

Meantime, the market’s crashed, the currency’s crashed, the bailout program is “virtually paused” and the staff at the finance ministry is still scratching its head about the bulge in the deficit that the PM’s sudden spending spree is causing. That’s also just because he felt like making the right kind of headlines, given his political situation at the time, regardless of the cost to the economy. Yet there’s no government, which means the ministries are rudderless and the bureaucracy is effectively handling everything. And since there are claims of foreign-driven and funded conspiracies, involving disloyalty by members of the house, the uncertainty will drag on for a while.

There’s an epic playing out in Punjab as well. It’s one thing to readily eat your ethical words to cling on to your seat, but it’s quite another to stage another novel drama, this one featuring catfights between female MPAs, and then refuse to hold the vote, even threaten disqualification of certain members, just because you don’t meet the constitutional requirement of necessary numbers. Especially when it means that the biggest, most important province is also without a chief executive. And both Punjab and the centre are deprived of legislation, which is why assemblies exist, because one side didn’t like where all the pieces of the puzzle fell.

The fact that all this is in very severe contrast to everything Imran Khan still claims to stand for is no longer even the point. But that the system is so vulnerable below the belt, and the fail-safe mechanism so ready to fall all over itself whenever it is really desperately needed, sure is. Clearly, this system is not about the people at all. For, the legal, constitutional alternative to all this was a return to the old father-son model of dynastic politics that runs this country like their own private enterprise.

Now the wheels are coming off the wagon so fast that there’s not even a slim chance of some of the changes that a lot of people believed were ready to come after PTI won the election. Instead, the country’s politics has degenerated and its economy has completely collapsed. And the loans that we need even more desperately now are becoming that much harder to get. There’s a good chance of the present Extended Fund Facility (EFF) not resuming as well, given the kind of biting reforms it requires, especially after the recent breakdown in structural fiscal discipline, which no new government would want to start with.

Pakistan may not have a precious limited resource that can be exploited, as the Wikipedia definition of banana republic requires, but it sure outdoes itself when it comes to the bit about “an impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political and military elites of that society.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022