Elections always make some happy and some unhappy. All cannot win. It is a sign of maturity to accept defeat with grace. Unfortunately, both `maturity’ and `grace’ are traits which are rare in our country.
We did not have a good start with elections. Firstly, we did not hold national elections until 1970 and freely rigged whatever elections we held. Resultantly, people have become skeptics and see conspiracies in all elections held anywhere in the world. I have heard people discussing rigging in the American elections as if they are talking of a local locality. There are always conspiracies on everybody’s mind: for a very long time, Americans were blamed for toppling regimes in Pakistan and for manipulating the election results. When they lost interest in Pakistan, people started blaming the local intelligence agencies for trying to achieve the desired results.
Come to think of it, rigging elections is not as easy as it was a couple of decades ago. The whole nation is equipped with mobile cameras. The more than 50+ TV channels are running around with their cameras looking for some breakthrough. It is thus not easy, if not impossible, for people running around with ballot boxes or stamping votes. We all have seen videos of this happening and the political parties indulging in such practices have suffered the consequences at the hands of the people.
I personally think that our intelligence agencies are over-rated. Actually hilariously, they grade themselves; many must have seen this video clip on WhatsApp that our agencies are the best in the world. Firstly, agencies should not interfere in the country’s internal politics: at least I cannot think of a major country except for dictatorial regimes where agencies paid by us tell us whom to elect as our ruler. Secondly, it must be a `banana government’ which cannot control intelligence agencies operating under its administrative control. If it is a state within a state then institutional reforms should be carried out.
Without talking of the past practices, Nawaz Sharif has all along relied on the military while ruling the country. He was introduced in politics by a military General and he always involves the military in all kinds of matters while in power. His problems actually started with the previous Army Chief, General Raheel Sharif. Due to Nawaz Sharif’s style of functioning which partly may be attributable to health reasons, General Raheel filled the political vacuum. The General started taking all the major strategic decisions the most important being the military action in the tribal areas which succeeded in crushing terrorism to a large extent in the country; hundreds of terrorists were killed while the remaining ones fled to Afghanistan. The nation heaved a sigh of relief as the daily bomb blasts suddenly stopped. One can only wish that this action could have been taken 15 years earlier as it would have saved thousands of innocent lives.
General Raheel became a national hero. His pictures could be seen everywhere including at the back of intercity trucks and the foreign dignitaries visiting Pakistan many a times came just to meet him and ignored meeting the Prime Minister all together. This was a big rebuff. But all of this was not being done at the whims of intelligence agencies but taking place on the basis of national and international perceptions. In the midst of his dharna in 2014, Imran Khan was called by General Raheel at the GHQ but the army did not take-over what many had feared.
The Nawaz Sharif regime was obviously getting jittery and jealous of all the attention that General Raheel was getting. It accordingly refused to give him an extension at the expiry of his tenure which incidentally the General had announced a year earlier that he would not seek. The mistake that the Nawaz regime made was its failure to improve its functioning and instead trying to pull the military’s popularity. The former federal Information Minister Pervez Rasheed is blamed for this strategy but he was not alone in formulating it. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was in the habit of meeting the Army Chief almost twice or thrice a week. After one major meeting attended by several others, a news was leaked in the Dawn newspaper in October 2016 that the military strategy in relation to supporting terrorists in India and Afghanistan was blamed for Pakistan’s growing international isolation. The Government chose to leak the news through a reporter whose family had only recently migrated from India and who was not a Muslim intrigued the intelligence agencies even more.
The military was infuriated and publicly expressed its anger. A probe was conducted which led to the dismissal of two federal ministers but the military remained dissatisfied. The die had been cast. And relations between the Sharif government and the military could not improve after that. Nawaz Sharif apparently was fast losing luck as in the midst of all this tension Panama documents were leaked. Sharif was ill-advised to make one statement after another in the National Assembly which landed in even more trouble as he was not telling the truth and concealing almost everything connected to the London flat ownership. It was at this point that Nawaz was advised to go all out against the Army, the intelligence agencies and the judiciary. It was a clear diversionary tactic but it back-fired and eventually led to his disqualification and then his conviction and incarceration.
The credit for leading this crusade single-handedly goes to Imran Khan. He did not let it go and daily attended the court hearings in the Supreme Court where Nawaz Sharif did not go even once. The case was easy to decide as Nawaz Sharif was clearly living beyond his means and had not disclosed the funds that led to the purchase of the London flats. One did not need the help of intelligence agencies to pursue this matter further. Many of the Supreme Court Judges hearing the case were appointed by Nawaz Sharif himself in the nineties and they thus gave him almost a year to properly defend himself when actually the matter could have been decided within weeks if not days. The Prime Minister refused to submit any documentation and continued with his political victimization theme.
Actually, there was little that anybody could have done to help Nawaz Sharif. He was on a suicidal course as far as legal proceedings were concerned as his cries of intelligence agency cum Army conspiracy could not help him legally. Nawaz had been in power since 1981 and thus immensely powerful. He probably felt invincible. But he miscalculated the changed times; this is an era of social media where information cannot be curbed. He is adept at controlling the media through manipulation of advertisements costing billions but social media was beyond his control which Imran Khan relied upon extensively.
It is thus not fair to blame the Army and the intelligence agencies for Nawaz’ PML losing the July 2018 elections. Many outfits supposedly supported by them like the PSP in Karachi, the Zulfiqar Mirza clan in Badin, Hafiz Saeed’s Allah o Akbar and Tehrike Labaik were wiped out in the elections. Elections were not and could not have been rigged as it is not easy if not impossible to do so. It is possible that a few politicians belonging to PML may have been forced to switch sides but some politicians switch parties prior to every election: this is the very reason they are called lotas. And many of them lost and even if all of them had won, their presence in Imran’s PTI could not explain its victory.
We are a feudal society and new in the game of democracy. But one thing we need to learn if we desire the military to desist from involvement in our political affairs is to accept defeat in an election with grace and maturity and wish the victorious all the best. Elections after all are not about our pride and ego but about our country’s destiny.
The Last Stop 