The GT Road drama

Last week many of us wondered whether Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N would go full Insafian on GT Road, or whether better sense would prevail. The scenes enacted by the three-time former prime minister on his caravan to Lahore proves that the narrow interests of an individual have once again been too important to resist in favour of national stability and prosperity.

Several questions were being contested on GT Road last week. The trend seems to be that the answer to one question can be applied to all the others, and either because of partisanship or analytical blinders, the debate is thus settled. Let’s examine the big questions around which this country’s national leadership is contesting for power.

There are five key actors in the national discourse right now: Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, the army and the wider security establishment, the Supreme Court and the judiciary, Imran Khan and the PTI, and various other ancillary political actors, including the PPP.

The first task for these actors is to paint the others in a manner that favours their own narrative.

Nawaz Sharif wants the PM Office back. To get it, he needs his audience to treat the army, the judiciary and Imran Khan as one large mass of anti-democratic and anti-civilian set of forces that have undermined him as a means of preventing him from fixing regional politics and bringing electricity and jobs to his supporters. The ancillary political actors can be charmed or muscled into submission.

The security establishment wants uninterrupted and unchallenged control of the national story of Pakistan – and this is most easily achieved by ensuring that all political actors seem to be lesser beings than those that serve this nation in uniform. For the establishment, the PML-N, PTI, PPP and all other actors are essentially different models of the same car. Useful, but ultimately troublesome. The more they fight it out among themselves, the better – but those that challenge the armed forces will be painted as traitors.

The judiciary wants to be seen as impartial, fair, and capable of doing its part as a critical institution of the modern Pakistani state. This is easier to do by crawling the headlines for suo motus, and knocking out prime ministers than it is by clearing case loads and establishing a judiciary at the local and provincial levels that delivers real justice. The Iftikhar Chaudhry model of judicial independence and relevance is not about to go away. It isn’t clear whether the judges’ appetite for relevance includes cases involving serving or retired military officers. Every judge of the Supreme Court knows that if the rigidity displayed in the 5-0 decision against Nawaz Sharif never shows up again, the perception of the judiciary as an implement, rather than an autonomous institution, will be strengthened. Nawaz Sharif’s provocations from GT Road will matter less to the justices than this.

Imran Khan wants to be prime minister. He cannot outright win an election in this country because he and his party have a contempt for politics as it exists in this country. This contempt drives the PTI to not only muck-rack the party’s actual political opponents, but also their supporters. Those that would dare interpret an absence of support for the PTI as a function of something other than moral turpitude and corruption are themselves compromised and corrupt. Essentially, if you are not a PTI supporter, you are either corrupt or stupid. These aren’t the words of PTI critics, but of the PTI don himself. Given that the PTI has never won more than 30 seats in an election, this is a curious approach. It is exactly the kind of approach that places strict limits on the PTI’s electoral potential. To become PM, Khan needs his most potent opponents to be knocked out for him, either by external actors (like the judiciary) or by internal conflict (like a father-son quarrel, or a brother-brother quarrel). For Khan, the army and judiciary can do no wrong – and most other parties and groups are scum.

This leaves other parties, principally the PPP, but also the ANP, MQM, JUI-F, Jamaat-e-Islami, and a number of smaller, but potent religious groups. All of them have relevance in both electoral and narrative terms. Religious groups can decide to call someone a kaafir at a moment’s notice. These declarations can be fatal. Nationalist groups can call people’s identity into question; this has fuelled the MQM’s remarkable resilience over three decades. Numbers, even small ones, matter in a bicameral parliamentary system like Pakistan’s. The PPP and others matter in parliament and in various pockets of the country. Treating Pakistan like a two-party state is a common mistake, but yields skewed and spurious interpretations of events.

Amongst these key actors, Nawaz Sharif wants a conversation about the power of the vote over the power of the army. This is not as simple as he wants it to be. The army and the vote are not as distinct or separate as many civ-mil binarists in Pakistan would like them to be. As he drove along GT Road, Sharif pulled large crowds, but the story of those that stayed home is more interesting than those that came out. Among those that stayed home were millions of PML-N voters. And among those are millions of north Punjab residents who have had at least one family member in the armed forces in recent years. Many of them have seen the brutality of war up close – as casualties and fatalities from Pakistan’s fight against terror have stacked up since 2005. How successful can an attempt to turn the Punjabi heartland against the military ever be? Nawaz Sharif will discover that a war-time military has a lot more leeway than the English op-ed pages would lead him to believe. It may not be fair, but it’s how this works.

Sharif also wants a conversation about the power of the vote over the power of legal technicalities. Here too it is more complex than he needs it to be. No one enacted any conspiracy to make the Sharifs as vulnerable on Panama and Panama plus issues as they were. The Sharifs’ vulnerability was a product of extreme arrogance, lack of preparation and a completely unjustified victimhood complex. Those that wear watches worth more than divisional budgets don’t get to claim victimhood in Pakistan. This is a Pakistan in which nearly a third of all Pakistanis were not conscious when Nawaz Sharif was deposed by General Musharraf.

In the 2018 election, first-time eighteen year old voters will vote with no adult memory of the lawyers’ movement, no memory of Nawab Akbar Bugti, no memory of Benazir Bhutto and lots of Whatsapp forwards and television talk show clips. Will they be as grateful to the Sharifs for all the roads, highways, metros and laptops as the Sharifs would like? Especially when their most recent political memory is the shambles of a defence that the Sharifs presented when faced with the Panama case?

These are questions that Nawaz Sharif should be discussing within his party leadership. Sadly, the leadership group of the PML-N is satiated by images of large crowds along GT Road. There can be little doubt that after the hiccups in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the PML-N machine was able to rally numbers to their leader’s arrival at various points along GT Road. There can also be little doubt that those numbers have little bearing on the key questions that Sharif wants debated. The people of Gujranwala and Muridke will happily embrace their favourite politician when he drives by – but will they line up behind an anti-establishment narrative? And more importantly will the local bosses that helped mobilise those crowds do the same?

Most importantly perhaps is the larger question that emerges from all this. Which of the five actors in Pakistan’s political drama benefits most from the continued absence of clear answers to basic questions? As always it is those in the shadows. Anyone that tries to sell us dreams of an improved civ-mil equation in Pakistan whilst projecting the disarray within their parties onto the streets of Pakistan is trying to fool us. Those in the shadows can’t be beat without searchlights. And you can’t use searchlights if you don’t have any electricity.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.