Over the past three weeks, a new architecture has emerged in Pakistan — a new government but one that has many familiar faces. Shehbaz Sharif is back in spite of some expecting Nawaz Sharif to be the prime minister for a fourth time. The latter stepped aside for his brother; this is being seen as an acknowledgement of his party’s lacklustre performance in the February elections in which the real winners in the popular perception were Imran Khan and his supporters, many of whom contested and won as independent forming the single largest group in the new National Assembly. They outnumber the two other national parties — the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz of the Sharif brothers and the Pakistan Peoples Party of the Bhuttos.
The real takeaway from this election was how well Imran Khan and his supporters performed in spite of the evident and strong opposition of the military establishment.
The anti-military/anti-establishment space in Pakistan is now occupied by Imran Khan. His electoral performance and him biding his time in jail add unpredictable, even combustible, elements to Pakistan’s perennial cocktail of deeply problematic issues.
Alongside the new government, Pakistan also has a new president in the familiar face of Asif Ali Zardari. For the first time, Pakistan will have a president elected to serve for a second term. His first tenure as president from 2008 to 2013 was in the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. That made Zardari a Bhutto legatee in a true sense as the father to Benazir’s children. His political career merits recalling. Through much of the 1990s and the early years of this century, Zardari was in jail as an undertrial facing numerous corruption charges. But this was also a means of pressurising Benazir Bhutto. He was ultimately never convicted despite spending some 11 years in jail — a record of sorts in Pakistan, perhaps even the whole of South Asia.
To some, Zardari is a big-time crook and, for others, he is an astute politician; but the significant fact is that he is the president again. Zardari’s political profile and the fact that he and his children head the PPP mean that his role will be much more than that of a ceremonial head of State.
The PPP’s support for the coalition that Shehbaz Sharif now leads is vital. Yet, it is support from the outside as the PPP has not joined the government. This makes the current coalition that much shakier, at least in terms of perception, notwithstanding the military’s firm backing. How long will this government last? What are the military’s long-term plans, if any? And, most of all, what will Imran Khan do from prison to keep the momentum going in his favour? These are the questions that keep Pakistan enthralled.
The tasks before the new government are onerous: heading the list is the economy and the numerous structural ills that plague it. Another — larger — package from the International Monetary Fund is inevitable and negotiations have already begun on this. The real issues here are the attendant conditionalities and the burden of public opprobrium that this will additionally place on a government that already has question marks over its mandate and credibility. The absence of geopolitical leverage means negotiations with external donors and the IMF are even more of an uphill task. The United States of America withdrawing from Afghanistan has removed the strongest leverage that Pakistan possessed.
External issues before the government are no less daunting. Earlier this week, the Af-Pak border witnessed intense clashes following a terrorist attack, which saw a number of Pakistani army personnel, including a senior officer, killed. The Afghans have since accused Pakistan of using its air force for strikes inside Afghanistan. Air strikes by Pakistan had also been reported in 2022 and 2023 but this time the charge has not been denied and, thus, in effect, confirmed. This marks a new level of intensity in the friction between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Relations with the Taliban government in Afghanistan have deteriorated faster and further than anyone anticipated. This relationship subsumes a major domestic difficulty for Pakistan — the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Its numerous terrorist attacks now take a toll and place a burden that no government can take for long. Alongside, there are new worries about the relationship with Iran after the missile and drone strikes and counterstrikes carried out in January this year. Frictions with Iran or Afghanistan are not new but the intensity of the clashes
certainly are.
There is also the perennial issue of India. However, in this at least, unlike with Afghanistan, the TTP or the economy-related issues, the new government has some time. The Indian elections will provide breathing space of a few months to decide on whether and how to break the long impasse in bilateral relations.
A few days ago, there appeared to be an introspection of sorts about a particularly traumatic event in Pakistan’s history. The Supreme Court ruled that the conviction and consequent hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did not meet the requirements of a fair trial. The Chief Justice of Pakistan said that the judiciary should face up to its “past missteps and fallibilities with humility.” To some, this acknowledgement was a milestone in itself in the country’s political history. Others wonder whether words, rather than deeds, can constitute real change.
Will the fresh downturn with Iran and Afghanistan and the prolonged downturn with India lead to some introspection among Pakistan’s strategic elite about the direction in which their country is headed? It is now almost a cliché that Pakistan’s history has often come to a turning point and then refused to turn even while the country’s elite offers lip service to the need for real change. Nevertheless, the recent air strikes by Pakistan against Afghanistan and the Iranian missile and drone strikes of January have some similarities with the Indian strike in Balakot in February 2019. Given the strategic similarities in these kinetic actions, some new ideas may yet emerge for South Asia as a whole, although it may still be early days to assert this.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan. His latest book is Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle
