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OVER the past five decades when autocratic rulers have appeared a bit shaky, the global environment has changed beyond anticipation and almost buttressed their chances of staying in the saddle.
After overthrowing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977 and even conspiring with the then superior courts to have the former prime minister sentenced to death, military ruler Gen Ziaul Haq appeared shaky and any street movement worth its name may well have dislodged him from power.
Initially, Ziaul Haq may have been seen as the umpire blowing the whistle and someone who pledged fresh elections within 90 days when the political game between the government and the opposition got rough during protests on account of rigging allegations against the incumbents.
Over time, his credentials started to get more and more suspect. People joked that the abbreviation (CMLA) of his title chief martial law administrator had changed to ‘cancel my last announcement’. It was becoming abundantly clear to all that his ambition was fast changing and so were his plans.
Before the pandemic took the world in its grip what was the state of play in Pakistan?
Zia went from being a ‘neutral umpire’ committed to an election within 90 days to putting accountability, Islamisation and many other red herrings ahead of any possible polls. This started to cause some discomfort even among the political parties that had opposed Bhutto.
But then two things happened in 1979. Firstly, the year began with the Iranian revolution which saw the Shah of Iran overthrown and a clergy-supported government replacing him, which was hostile to the United States. The US had lost its policeman in the region.
Conveniently, Zia stepped into part of that role. He felt confident enough now to execute Bhutto and scrap all talk of restoration of representative rule in the country. And then the biggest boon came for the Zia regime.
Soviet tanks and troops rolled into Kabul, having crossed the Oxus, to stem the instability triggered by the infighting between the Khalqi and Parcham factions of the ruling Popular Democratic Party of Afghanistan.
The next nine years need no elaboration. Pakistan may have contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union by serving as the spearhead of the CIA campaign to give the Red Army a bloody nose in Afghanistan, but the cost to our nation was, and is to this day, incalculable.
It took a plane crash to change the face and the modus operandi of the dictatorship in 1988 but the roots it dropped in the country were too deep to enable any meaningful democracy to function. It was pretty entrenched even if its public face changed. And remains so to this day.
Fast forward to ‘chief executive’ Gen Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 1999 and how tentative his hold over power appeared when in March the following year US President Bill Clinton arrived in Islamabad for a few hours to deliver a public rebuke to the Pakistani military ruler delivered via a televised address to Pakistanis. Clinton would not even be seen shaking hands with his host on camera.
The world community had shunned Musharraf as someone who had rolled back democracy and that was not acceptable. But then in September 2001, Al Qaeda launched ‘spectacular’ attacks, hijacking and slamming airliners packed with passengers into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon near the US capital.
The international pariah of a few weeks earlier suddenly became the darling of the Western world, whose leaders’ planes used to be in a holding pattern over Islamabad; such was the rush of those desirous of meeting him and to be seen shaking his hand. The rest is history.
The question is whether Covid-19 will also represent such a fillip for Prime Minister Imran Khan. Hang on before you think I am stretching things way too far. Consider this. Before the pandemic took the world in its grip what was the state of play in Pakistan?
The economy was in the doldrums and the growth rate had fallen to abysmally low levels compared to the past few years. While the incumbents had lashed out at the debt accumulated by their predecessors, their own headline debt number was an embarrassment.
Debt servicing was becoming an uphill task, with revenue generation proving to be problematic. Targets were being adjusted (downward) in perpetuity. Exports, which the dramatic slide in the rupee exchange value was supposed to kick-start, had not risen to any appreciable level.
On top of this, scandals had started to rock the government and many were seeing it as fast becoming synonymous with incompetence and misgovernance. There were also murmurs echoing undercurrents in the real power centre of the country that suggested some kind of change was under way.
Covid-19 seems to have pushed all of this off the table. It has allowed the prime minister to rename the globally acclaimed Benazir Income Support Programme and expand the cash subsidy scheme for the very poor so they can put food on the table during the lockdown.
The cash subsidy has surely earned him goodwill in the poorest segments. Also, the pressure of debt-servicing has eased for the foreseeable future, and virus-related aid and funds have started to flow in. This has emboldened Imran Khan to now roll out his Economy First agenda.
By easing the lockdown, he will win over the entrepreneurs and industrialists who were wary of his policies. Over the coming months, the government will be hoping that the Gulf nations restart their economies with massive resource injections even if oil prices have hit rock bottom and our remittances stabilise.
One earnestly hopes that this end to the lockdown, and the mixed messaging that preceded it, does not accelerate the Covid-19 spread and deaths as that would be an unmitigated disaster for the country and not just for the government. The rest ought to be manageable.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2020
