ISLAMABAD: In most countries, politicians who warned that aliens were trying to influence an upcoming general election would likely find themselves ridiculed by the media and shunned at the ballot box.
In Pakistan, where cryptic references to “invisible hands” wielded by “the boys” have long been part of the political lexicon, such talk is a staple of the campaign trail.
Ahead of the July 25 vote, ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has cautioned that “aliens” (Pakistan’s military) will attempt to prevent his party from winning another five-year term. Others whisper about the role the country’s feared “angels” (intelligence services) might play.
The colourful terminology is partly a reflection of Pakistan’s rich linguistic heritage, peppered with English terms such as “blue-eyed boy” (one favoured by those in power) and “red lines” (forbidden subjects).
A closer look, though, shows a political vocabulary born out of fear of openly criticising the country’s powerful military – the unnamed subject of most of the creative language.
“These terms are particular to Pakistan because of our governance structure,” said Jibran Nasir, a prominent human rights lawyer and activist. “We have militarised politics, and that’s something you don’t get so often in a modern-day democracy.”
Coming a decade after former army chief Pervez Musharraf was forced from power, July’s general election is billed as a historic event that would mark only the second democratic transition of power for a nation that has been ruled by the military for nearly half its history since independence in 1947.
But intensifying allegations of military meddling threaten to cast a shadow over the milestone, with senior figures in Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) alleging “hidden forces” are trying to weaken the party.
“Higher Powers”
With newspapers abuzz with claims the establishment is attempting to engineer the election result and media houses complaining that “higher powers” are crushing free speech, journalists too are relying on oblique terms to get their message across without angering the “Establishment” along with some senior civil servants and judges.
In a recent speech, Sharif accused “invisible aliens” of intimidating his lawmakers and pushing them to switch sides.
“The real aliens…have been there for 70 years,” Sharif said. “Now, it is going to have a match, God willing, with humans, and humans with the blessing of God will defeat the aliens.”
On Monday, Pakistan’s military spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor declined to comment when he was asked at a news conference about the military being referred to as “aliens”.
Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician whose Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party is seen as PML-N’s main challenger, denies colluding with the military, but has in the past teased crowds at rallies that a “third umpire” might dismiss PML-N’s then-premier Sharif, widely interpreted as relying on a cricketing metaphor to suggest the army might intervene.
Nasir, the rights lawyer, said introducing “aliens” into the political lexicon was a calculated move by Sharif.
“It may be difficult for low-level PML-N workers to openly and publicly keep repeating that Nawaz Sharif is not competing against Imran Khan but against the military,” Nasir said.
“But it is easy for a worker to say he’s fighting ‘aliens’, and act naive. Everybody knows what he means.”
Many of the oblique terms for the military took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, during the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, who had journalists tortured and whose censors vetted all stories before they were published.
Many writers also feel the influence and overflow of Pakistan’s lingua-franca Urdu, a flowery and poetic language, has swelled the popularity of such colourful turns of phrase in English, which is Pakistan’s second official language widely spoken by the political and business elites.
Talal Chaudhry, state minister for interior affairs until last week, recently told Reuters that certain state institutions were pressuring rights activists to stifle dissent and create a “controlled democracy”, which in Pakistan refers to the concept of de facto military control.
But when asked which state institutions he was referring to, Talal declined to name them.
“By naming them things might get even worse and we don’t want to make things worse,” Talal said. “We want to make them better.”
