Mid-term elections?

Former President of Pakistan and co-chairperson of PPP Asif Zardari has set the cat among the pigeons by claiming that he is receiving hints of mid-term polls. He argued that state institutions should stay neutral and allow free and fair elections so that a truly representative government comes to power. Whether, however, his boast that PPP would form the next government if this condition is met can be taken seriously is a moot point. Perhaps it can politely only be called the triumph of hope over reality. Confined as it has been for the last five years to its home base Sindh, no party, including the PPP, can dream such dreams without enjoying a majority in Punjab, which the PPP is not even at the beginning of.
Despite this exaggerated claim, much of what Asif Zardari said makes sense and goes to the heart of the familiar malaise Pakistan is once again suffering from. He has asked the very pertinent question why puppets are created and what purpose they serve. Referring to past examples of such debacles, he cited the case of Altaf Hussain of the MQM and Nawaz Sharif (at least in his original entry into politics). The former, Zardari argued, had switched loyalties and the latter, despite being a creature of the establishment, they had quarrelled with.
Zardari castigated the PTI government on three fronts: foreign policy, handling of the economy, and indifference to the plight of the people. On foreign policy, he argued that this government did not have the vision or understanding of issues to know how to deal with friendly countries. It is rumoured that it took a praetorian intervention to persuade the Saudis to chip in and help us out economically when Prime Minister Imran Khan's first visit failed to produce any results. Our closest friend and currently biggest but only investor China was alienated by public criticism of CPEC. Reservations regarding the thrust and terms of the $ 60 billion investment provided by CPEC to Pakistan that cannot at the moment capture a dollar's worth of foreign investment in green field projects from anywhere else could and should have been handled discreetly in discussions with Beijing instead of embarrassing China by criticizing CPEC in the public space.
Handling of the economy, based on the first four months of this government's tenure, is all at sea, with the left hand seemingly unaware of what the right hand is doing. Examples that bear this impression out are the management of the rupee-dollar parity, stupid measures such as the sudden imposition of a heavy duty on new mobile phones brought into the country, inability to smoothly manage gas and electricity supply, utilities pricing, etc, incapacity to incentivise the export sector, boost exportable surpluses, produce a rational policy to curb high imports, apply closure to the IMF negotiations, and the list goes on and on at the expense of the skittish markets and ordinary citizens shell shocked by the unaffordable rise in prices.
This last issue, in which household food and energy budgets have taken a painful hit, is exacerbated by verbatim implementation of the Supreme Court's orders to demolish all encroachments throughout the country with nary a thought for how these long standing encroachments survived for so long, why they happened in the first place, or finding humane solutions in favour of the affectees and the country. In Pakistan, the fastest urbanising country in South Asia, the neglect of economic, demographic and social trends has reaped a tragic denouement. Unmet demand for housing, employment and business opportunities that has been burgeoning at an unprecedented pace because of the push (agriculture no longer being able to support large families) and pull (education, employment, business, facilities, better lifestyle in the urban areas) factors that have been a fact of life for decades is then met by squatting. Katchi abadis (informal squatter settlements) sprout in the cities and on their periphery and enterprises bribe their way through the bureaucratic maze to get a toehold in the markets (subsequently encroaching further on public space and roads). The blind anti-encroachment drive in progress is accused at times of ignoring legitimate properties and subjecting them to the same bulldozer treatment as those unentitled. Encroachments are of course illegal and often an eyesore. But an enlightened policy would have planned alternative housing and markets before unleashing the demolition squads. Now the PTI government's promises of 10 million jobs and five million houses lie wrecked in the rubble of the demolished structures.
December 16, 2018 was a sober reminder of two major tragedies from the past: the surrender at Dhaka and the Army Public School (APS) massacre in Peshawar. The first dates to 1971 (for those unaware of this history) when Pakistan's brutal genocide in East Pakistan following the failure to respect the people's mandate in the 1970 elections eventually saw the country humiliated and broken by Indian military intervention in aid of the Bengali insurgents. The second is of more recent date, 2014, when the APS students and their teachers were put to the sword by terrorists. The national shock and mourning that followed energised the civilian and military leadership to grasp the terrorist nettle firmly and eliminate it root and branch. However, while the bulk of the terrorists in erstwhile FATA were killed or forced to flee across the border into the poorly policed areas on the Afghanistan border by the military's counterinsurgency campaign, the National Action Plan envisaged to combat sleeper cells left behind all over the country by the fleeing terrorists has not seen as determined an implementation. The lava of terrorism therefore is dormant, not entirely scotched.
Meanwhile the polity is suffering from some familiar maladies, albeit in a more subtle (hence effective) manner. Diversity, critical and dissenting voices are muzzled amidst accusations against such voices of being 'anti-state'. The mainstream media struggles under one of the most draconian violations of freedom of expression ever seen. Media houses' managements have been cowed by financial 'sanctions', hundreds if not thousands of journalists all over the country have been fired. Those surviving in the field face a raft of pressures from the powers-that-be, including killing, threats to life, violence and disappearance. Social media is being monitored strictly and the example of bloggers picked up and subjected to the tender mercies of the security establishment to break them in spirit and body is by now the stuff of urban legend.
The PTI government is either complicit in these shenanigans or even rooting for them at the top of its voice. Asif Zardari is not amiss in ascribing this indifference to the fact that this is not a genuinely and fairly elected government. The irony is that the praetorian authors of this latest foisting of leaders undemocratically brought to power are themselves baffled what to do next in the face of arguably one of the most incompetent governments in our fraught history. Plan B anyone?
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