Mired in multiple crises

We have celebrated the 77th anniversary of our independence of Pakistan on 14 August. As usual, there were rallies, official functions, speeches gloating over the small successes while shying away from the blunders committed by us during these long years. 

The 14 August should actually be a day of reckoning and introspection. The day should remind us of our national failures rather than the meagre achievements we have recorded during these 77 years. Today, we have multiple crises that are more threatening to our territorial integrity than what we confronted 50 years ago ripping the country asunder.

These crises are hampering us to break out of our self-created precarious situation. The lack of leadership; the want of political will; the political divide; the dichotomy of  power; the hybridity of governance; the social and economic injustice; the injudicious use of financial resources; the elitism; the corruption; the politicized anti-graft institutions; the managed elections; the engineered electoral outcomes; the absence of the rule of law; the crumbling prosecution system; the policed state; the religion-induced terrorism; the festering insurgency – all have combined to push us to a dangerous edge. We are securely shackled by short-sighted political interests, party politics, institutional hegemony with misplaced prejudices and complexes. The sufferer is the country deeply stuck in political inertia, economic stagflation with the teeming millions languishing at the bottom of the societal pyramid.

The country is really caught in a dangerous situation. The political polarisation continues unabated since April 2022. The mainstream political parties and their popular leaders, turn by turn, have been facing the music since 1977 facing state coercion, prosecution, incarceration, assassination. National elections have since been managed and electoral outcomes engineered to the dismay of the electorate and the genuine political leadership. The national politics has remained dominated by the so-called powerful class created by the British imperialists as tools to control the vast territorial possessions in this part of the Sub-continent. Later, they or their dynastic successors swiped their role to be part of any establishment-supported political administration or any popular political party in Pakistan. Since 1958 to this day, their collusion or nexus with the establishment has continued without an iota of shame. The string pullers choose, exploit and throw the puppets at their convenience. This political spectacle has been the hallmark of our national political landscape since that fateful day.

Coming back to the current situation, there seems no likelihood of any thaw between the most popular defiant political party and the establishment. The latter never had any dearth of political collaborators enabling it to cobble coalition political administrations to remain in the saddle during its majestic pleasure. So exactly is the situation currently.  All options – state coercion, avalanche of false criminal cases, prosecutions, arrests and incarcerations have been tried to decimate the besieged political party. The parliament has been misused to frame specific laws or amend the existing laws to circumvent the verdicts of the court. The ruling class is fully focused on this issue paying lip service to the other equally menacing crises like the economic meltdown, the unparalleled poverty growth, the gnawing social and economic inequality, the population explosion and the crumbling healthcare and education.

You cannot ban this party, stop people from supporting it, intimidate its leadership by prosecution and incarceration, legitimize the engineered electoral outcomes, sustain the current hybrid political administrations, and circumvent the judicial powers of the superior courts. People of Pakistan no more believe in the old platitudes of anti-Pakistan, anti-Islam or traitors and collaborators of adversary powers. These clichés, repeated and overused over long years, have lost their cogency, potency and credibility. The times have changed; the internet access and social media explosion has turned the globe into a well-connected village. Nothing stays local. Only our establishment has not gone beyond its outdated and outmoded tools of dealing with the defiant political leaders.

The protests of the people for the plunder of their resources remain unheeded. The pliant provincial political administrations are coerced to give away lands, mines, mineral, hydrocarbon resources, jobs, lawful share of irrigation water of their provinces without any murmur of protest. The people of Sindh and Balochistan are seething with anger and anguish over the audacious moves of the central authority to appropriate their resources. The recent allocation of coastal and cultivable lands for DHA Housing Schemes and Corporate Farming in Sindh has agitated the people of the province who are powerless or helpless to have their voice heard and their miseries seen by the arrogant ruling elite. The outrage of the Baloch over the exploitation of their mines and mineral and their struggle for ownership of the resources of Balochistan is decades-old and has remained at the heart of every political agitation and insurgency.

The hybrid regimes in Balochistan have always been unable to correct the situation for the past five decades since the dismissal of the genuine elected government of National Awami Party in 1973 by the Bhutto regime and the ensuing insurgency in the Baloch lands. The current situation in Balochistan is very dismal. The province is in the grip of insurgency since 2006. There have been proxy wars, bloodletting, target killings, enforced disappearances and violent clashes as the consequences of the insurgency. The people of the province are no more enamoured of the old guard politicians or the new establishment-sponsored leadership. This has been time and again proved. It may be the Haq Do movement in Gwadar or the fast-swelling public following of Dr. Mahrang Baloch and her three women comrades that signify the gathering tempest in the province.

Mahrang was an ordinary woman leading a small movement for the recovery of the victims of enforced disappearance. She had a long march with women and children from Balochistan to Islamabad. They encamped peacefully in the capital. They were mistreated and finally bundled in buses and dispatched to Quetta. On reaching there, she was greeted by a mammoth crowd. The Quetta Stadium was filled to the brim by the people. We have just witnessed her power collecting hundreds of thousands in Gwadar and Panjgur despite all odds thrown in her way by the establishment. The provincial administration cobbled by the establishment in the province never inspired any public confidence and is looked down upon as the tool of the invisible powers that propel it.

There are no two options for a way forward. The hundreds of the criminal cases registered against the PTI have to be scrapped after a quick review by a Judicial Commission of the sitting Judges of the Supreme Court to lower the political tension. The state institutions should willingly go back to their constitutional mandates unshackling the Election Commission from all institutional pulls and pushes to hold free and fair elections paving the way for a truly representative government in the country. Nothing is more sacred than the country. Before the general elections, the political leadership should sign Charters of Democracy and Economy to work together for the next two decades. They have to catch up with the time which is fast slipping out of their hand. They will have to stand in the dock if something untoward, God forbid, happens to the country.