Someone from the PTI recently declared that Nawaz Sharif was on the wrong side of history. That is not entirely incorrect. But Sharif is not alone. We, as a nation, are on the wrong side of history.
We only seem to realize that history has just passed us by, when we discover ourselves unable to meet our international financial liabilities. But I think the greatest indicator that points to our position as patently on the wrong side of history is the fact that in the 77 years of our existence, we have failed to agree upon the nature of our political system that could provide us the basis for governing our society and state.
Only 15 years ago, we were a military governed state and the men on horseback decided that they had the authority to contaminate the only document that still bears the signature of all the major political opinions and ideological leaders that were present in the 1973 Constituent Assembly. The generals in 2002 imposed a mixed system of parliamentary democracy with a very strong president, who insisted on continuing to wear the uniform while in office.
Our constitutional history is filled with repeated attempts by military adventurers to introduce a presidential form of government, followed by repeated attempts by political parties’ governments to bring parliamentary democracy back to life. The irony is that parliamentary democracy and its constitutional arrangement never matched the realities of the power structure of our society.
In the post Zia period, we had a troika, consisting of a powerful President, an even more powerful Army Chief and a Prime Minister whose authority and office was overshadowed by two former offices. In the post-Musharraf Period, we had a very powerful and active COAS presiding over a military machine that controls the coercive machinery of the state, manages the foreign policy as diplomat-in-Chief, at least till the time of General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and who is domestically so powerful that just by withdrawing support for an elected government, he can force regime change in Islamabad.
We are on the wrong side of history because we have not been able to agree upon the nature of political structures through which we intend to govern our society.
In 1973, our political leaders from across the political and ideological spectrum decided that we would have a federal parliamentary system—this, however, didn’t match the power realities in our society either. Developments in the regional and international political landscapes reflected on our domestic scene and new power centers emerged in our midst – the military was already a power center at the time of independence, but the Cold War and later the war on terror made intelligence agencies another power center.
The absence of parliamentary traditions and strong political parties led to a vacuum which was filled by the judiciary, military and intelligence services. Judicial and military bureaucrats started to pretend they were our saviors, and we generally tend to believe them. In this system, the political leaders who are supposed to represent the interests of the people became mere supplicants or mere courtiers in the courts of military bureaucrats, spymasters and judges. Fixed tenure bureaucrats have a tendency to engage in petty personal interests like salaries, perks, privileges and the pomp associated with their offices. Their pomp and show were presented as political brilliance by our tawdry media, which became inherently corrupt because of its proximity with the power centers. These power centers are now engaging in the game of serving their petty institutional interests and presenting their machinations for that purpose as acts of saving the nation.
The media is an accomplice. The judges, generals and spymasters don’t realize that through adhering to bureaucratic processes and mechanics, they are collectively pushing society towards anarchy. Law, rules and bureaucratic straight lines are great in normal conditions. We are facing a monumental crisis, where we have become victims of our own misdeeds. There is absolutely no one who realizes the enormity of the problem at hand.
This crisis is bigger than the petty bureaucratic rule-oriented mentality of judges, generals and the spymasters. There is no realization that we are on the wrong side of history.
I will give you two examples to substantiate my argument. The march of history has long bypassed us. We have no realization that standing still or moving slowly during a stampede can prove deadly. We are living in a fast-changing world where nations that don’t adjust to the dynamics of change will face a crisis of survival. The world is about to hit a crisis of planetary dimensions with which no single state would be able to cope on its own.
We are not politically mature enough to handle crises of international dimensions without shooting ourselves in the foot.
One of these crises is climate change, that would hit weak states like Pakistan the hardest. Food shortages, agriculture production crises, water shortages, mass migrations or exodus are some of the deadly phenomena that will accompany climate change. There are many experts who are predicting that weak states like Pakistan would crumble under the pressure of disasters that would accompany climate change. This could mean Pakistan’s coastal cities submerging under rising sea levels, drought turning tracts of our land unfit for agricultural production.
Both outward and inward migration is possible. Climate scientists claim that we have 11 years’ time to stop carbon emissions into the atmosphere if we are to have any chances of controlling world temperatures rising to a level where, “violent storms, deep flooding, gripping droughts and problematic sea-level rise” become the norm. Pakistan is not the only country in the region which will be affected by climate change. India is equally vulnerable. But the Pakistani state is weaker than the Indian state insofar as withstanding the pressure of climate change is concerned. India’s financial and material resources are enormous as compared to us.
This is where the question of the nature of our political system becomes immensely relevant. The power centers in Pakistan are at each other's throats in normal circumstances. How would these power centers behave under the pressure of climate change induced disasters? That is why I say we are on the wrong side of history as a nation. The march of history will make nature and earth's environment very difficult for mankind in the coming two decades. Pakistan has not yet even started to ponder how we intend on coping with this challenge. We have not yet decided whether parliamentary democracy is good for us. Or will military autocracy serve us better?
The useless prattling that we witness in our primetime talk shows and the mendacious political controversies that are the staple of our media reporting will not occupy more than a footnote in any serious history about the disaster that is likely to befall our society and state in case of irreversible climate change becoming a reality, or if a major war were break out in our region.
Second, the building crisis in the international system concerns war returning as a mechanism in international politics. There is hardly any economically important region of the world where the threat of war is not looming large on the horizon. American think-tanks are producing a plethora of literature about possible conflict between the US and China. The Korean peninsula is tense, China-India border tensions are a norm, Pakistan-India tensions persist, the Middle East is never far from a major war, the Israelis are carrying out a genocide against the innocent people of Gaza.
The Pakistani political system is too fragile to withstand the pressures of war—whether the Pakistani state itself is fighting a war, or whether it is under pressure from a condition created by war in a far flung region of the world is immaterial. In the wake of the Kargil conflict, we experienced a military coup. Amid the Ukraine war, Islamabad witnessed a regime change. This indicates that the Pakistani state machinery gets panicky when they see a war. The Kargil conflict was followed by tensions between the Prime Minister and COAS. The Ukraine conflict brought economic and financial pressures to bear on our society. How about a China-India conflict over their disputed international border? How does the Pakistani military respond within the country?
We are not politically mature enough to handle crises of international dimensions without shooting ourselves in the foot. What kind of economic pressure will hit us in case of international conflict in the Middle East? Especially if the oil price goes up in the international market? What would become of our industrial production?
We are on the wrong side of history because we don’t have answers to these questions. We are too busy utilizing all our political capacity to send one leader into jail and to release another. And yet, people who are engaged in this useless behavior don’t feel any qualms in pretending to be saviors of the nation.
The useless prattling that we witness in our primetime talk shows and the mendacious political controversies that are the staple of our media reporting will not occupy more than a footnote in any serious history about the disaster that is likely to befall our society and state in case of irreversible climate change becoming a reality, or if a major war were break out in our region.
We need to wake up from our slumber, and should realize that in case any of these scenarios become realities, the Pakistan state would buckle under the pressure. In such a set of circumstances, the rituals of the law, media prattling and the pomp and show of generals will occupy center stage in explaining why disaster struck and tragedy befell Pakistan.