Marking time
“WHILE most of our leaders have, in terms of national objectives, wandered aimlessly, knowing not where they were or where they would go, the nation has virtually been marking time, paying in sweat and blood the price of strenuous endeavour but making little advance towards the goal.”
Reflecting on just eight years of independence, that’s how The Pakistan Times summed up the nation’s experience 70 years ago. The national tragedy is that not all that much has changed in the intervening decades. The comment above is preceded by the acknowledgement “that for many years, political events in Pakistan have been moulded by partisan malice or partisan desires”, and that “many of the ruling party’s representatives have far too often exhibited a depraving selfishness, a blinding lust for office, a shameless greed for power”.
It might be hard to trace back the antecedents of the Sharif family enterprise to the Muslim League in 1955, although certain strands of DNA could possibly be identified. “Divested of popular backing, the ruling party’s squabbling factions became even more unscrupulous. Elections were gerrymandered, the services were suborned to serve the Muslim League by dishonest and unfair means, political opponents were arrested without charge or trial, and murder plots and conspiracies were invented to justify acts of brutal, vindictive terror.”
Things have changed, of course. It’s no longer ruling parties that suborn the services, which back in 1955 indicated the military-bureaucratic elite inherited from the colonial power but has lately been euphemised as the establishment. That experiment ended in 1977. For a few decades now, it has been the other way around. Any party that refuses to be suborned pays the price. That might help to explain why Imran Khan, imprisoned by the same forces that once elevated him as an avatar of hybridistan, is prepared to negotiate only with them.
Pakistan’s journey has been troubled since the 1950s.
Pakistan’s first field marshal shut down The Pakistan Times, not only because of its domestic interventions but because the newspaper — somewhat inaccurately described by Time magazine as the best-edited communist publication in Asia — vehemently opposed Pakistan’s Cold War role as a regional appendage of the US in the 1950s. That was not entirely surprising, given the incipient state promoted itself to the West — initially Britain, of which it remained a dominion for almost a decade, and then the US — as a bulwark against communism, the West’s greatest fear at the time.
Pakistan has rarely diverged from that trajectory. Its first military ruler was hailed as an Asian de Gaulle, and the second was a Nixon-Kissinger favourite who served as a conduit to China. The third overcame his obloquy for murdering Pakistan’s first popularly elected prime minister by serving as a conduit for the American intervention in Afghanistan in the late 1970s — the consequences of which eventually led to a Taliban-led Kabul that Pakistan no longer is able to control.
The cause for jubilation tomorrow might focus on the idea that India’s attack following the Pahalgam terrorist attack was pushed back rather more robustly than India expected. New Delhi is still struggling to offer a coherent explanation for the failure of its four-day war. Seeking to politicise its military might spectacularly backfire. The Modi government has sought, without acknowledging it, to follow the trajectory of religious fundamentalism combined with authoritarianism that Pakistan also adopted.
Inevitably, the experiment has been a dismal failure. Future historians might be able to look upon India’s Modi phase as an aberration redolent of the 1975 Emergency. But who knows?
Not for the first time, Pakistan has trumped its largest neighbour as an appendage of the West, delighting in the newly coined field marshal’s international appeal, and convinced that he does not, unlike various previous military chiefs, wish to become president.
There is no guarantee India will recover from its Modi/Hindutva experience, but it might. It’s somewhat harder to make the same claim about Pakistan, which has toyed with democracy every now and then without fully achieving it. The closest it came to the ideal was in the early 1970s, but that proved to be only a brief interlude before military rule returned and never quite dissipated, even after the military plane carrying Ziaul Haq exploded in the skies.
The future was unwritten, but the so-called democracy that followed was never entirely dependent on voters’ choice. A year after The Pakistan Times offered the comments cited above, it felt obliged to ask in 1956, “How far is freedom yet? When will the people’s rule begin?” Seventy years on, those questions are yet to be answered.
Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2025