Crises old and new

It is hardly breaking news on the first day of the new (not so happy) year that Pakistan faces a slate of challenges if not crises that seem destined to test the sinews of even the strongest Hercules. Of these challenges and possible crises, some are old, some recently inherited, others wholly new and hitherto unknown.

Of the old crises, and at the risk of annoying our learned economists, it’s the economy (stupid!). If its travails can be summed up briefly, one may point to the process of deindustrialisation (contributed to majorly by the new shibboleth of privatisation as the solution to all our woes) underway for some 50 years now. Remaining industry is unable to export enough to sustain our critical import dependence stemming from the model of economic development we have been blindly trumpeting and following for decades.

Hence the inevitable resort to dusting off our permanent begging bowl. However, since our ‘strategic’ importance to the US-led west has declined considerably (communism now being seen as all but routed worldwide), we can no longer expect, let alone rely on, our habitual ‘free lunch’. Our Gulf patrons are by now weary of our perpetual begging for handouts and bailouts.

China has put economics in command (a profound reversal of Mao’s ‘politics in command’) and weighs support even to its most precious ally in the scales of capitalist profit and loss. We are therefore confronted with the uncomfortable necessity of getting off our knees (old habits die hard) and learning to stand upright on our own feet in a radically transformed and rapidly furthertransforming world.

In the absence of industrial development, the military-led SIFC (special investment facilitation council) is hoping to spark a new ‘green revolution’ in agriculture as the (continuing) base of our food security, raw material for industry, and perhaps export potential. All this is hoped for under the corporate umbrella of the military.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the changed conditions if not crisis in agriculture is amenable to the attempt to reproduce a green revolution that was relevant and useful in the 1960s, but may or may not be the answer to the farming landscape today.

Without being able in the present space to develop this argument fully, suffice it to say that without land reform and redistribution from the lax, inefficient large landholders to the poor and landless peasants who can then be expected to fulfil the need for intensive cultivation and contribute substantially to the rescue of the country’s economy, the hopes from military-led corporate farming may or may not yield the expected fruit.

Terrorism once again assails our lives as another of the old (at least 50 years again) crises engendered by our romance and flirtation with religious extremist proxies, first in the context of Afghanistan, later in the context of Kashmir, who, as proxies are wont to do, eventually freed themselves of the leash and turned on their former mentors and supporters (Israel’s similar experience with Hamas in an attempt to weaken the PLO is a striking contemporary clincher for this argument).

Two analytical reports (those of the CRSS and PICSS) inform us that terrorist attacks are at a six-year high, with violence up 56 percent and attacks up 69 percent in 2023 alone. In 789 attacks and counter-terrorism operations last year, 1,542 people were killed, 1,463 wounded.

The distribution of such attacks is also interesting, though not entirely unexpected. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan suffered 90 percent of the deaths and 84 percent of the terrorist attacks and counter-terrorism operations. Punjab and Sindh together suffered only eight percent of the deaths. In addition, sectarian violence killed 203 people, including 88 security personnel.

These are the fruits of our unthinking creation and bolstering of fanatical religious forces and groups under the delusion that they would always remain faithful to their benefactors. It is the nature of jihadist thought that has cancelled all such hopes and produced another round of terrorism since the 2021 takeover in Afghanistan by the Taliban and their seeming free hand to groups such as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate freely and at will from Afghan soil to attack Pakistan and its people.

One of the major strategic blunders of the military operations against these terrorists in the tribal areas was the illusion that simply driving them out of Pakistan (into Afghanistan) would be the end of the matter. The crushing of these forces and ensuring no chance of their resurrection depended heavily on a pincer movement to cut off their escape routes across the border into Afghanistan.

Instead, the military operations only succeeded in ‘exporting’ the problem, leaving open thereby the possibility that, helped by what appeared to be the inevitability of the Taliban coming to power in Afghanistan, and with help from the sleeper cells the TTP left behind in Pakistan, the hydra of terrorism would once again raise its head/s.

The juncture Pakistan is at is not very hopeful. If some naïve people believed that elections would somehow provide the wherewithal to lift us out of the morass the country and our people are trapped in, by now even the most generous amongst them must be having second thoughts.

There has emerged a pandemic of rejection of the nomination papers of aspirants to run in the general elections scheduled for February 8, 2024. Out of 25,951 applicants, the Returning Officers (ROs) recruited from the bureaucracy have accepted 22,711 (6,449 for the National Assembly, 16,262 for the provincial Assemblies).

The aspiring candidates rejected number 3,240 (1,024 National Assembly, 2,216 provincial Assemblies). Lest you are comforted by the thought that the overwhelming majority of aspirants have been accepted, we need to delve a little deeper into these numbers.

The overwhelming majority of the rejected belong to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) and include not only Imran Khan, but almost all the remaining leading figures left in the party after the tsunami of desertions following May 9, 2023.

PTI’s favourite ally Shaikh Rashid is amongst the rejected. But the rejection pandemic does not stop there. Included are worthies such as Akhtar Mengal of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M). No doubt such shenanigans will serve as salve for the festering wounds of the Baloch, whose women and youth have recently tasted the wrath of our wonderful police in Islamabad, a force unable to distinguish between peaceful protestors and the other type. The rejected applicants have till January 3, 2024 to challenge their rejection, which must be decided by January 10, 2024. Given the large number of such cases, time is tight and the outcome uncertain.

If the general elections are perceived to have been held, as the PTI is alleging, on the basis of ‘pre-poll rigging’ (as opposed to our time tested post-poll rigging), it will lead to an absence of stability and quite possibly a major crisis of legitimacy down the road.

If the present trend of reducing the elections to a farce continues, the state will then in its aftermath once again confront the lesson of our and the world’s history that state excesses are unable to dent the popularity of political parties and may even end up inadvertently enhancing it. If the current funereal mood in the country (reflecting a lack of hope of better things) continues in the presence of doubts about the legitimacy of the polls, turnout may well be low.

And when the new dispensation, besmirched by the taint of being helped into power by the powers-that-be, takes office, its other problems of management of the country’s problems may well pale in comparison with the possible political fallout of what appears increasingly like gerrymandering. Ah, the wisdom of our real rulers!

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024