Our Principal Contradiction

It’s superfluous to detail the political mess in which the country finds itself. The attack on former prime minister Imran Khan’s container, which has injured several PTI activists and Khan himself, is a reminder of how divisive and violent domestic politics has become.

At the time of writing this, the incident had just happened and information remained sketchy. We do not know whether the shooter or shooters were acting at someone’s behest or attacked the vehicle on their own. Be that as it may, this incident shows that partisan hate speech and digital trolling and abuses have crossed the line into actual, physical violence.

The incident also threatens to plunge Pakistan into partisan chaos at a time when what it needs, above all else, is a civilian, political agreement. The lines below were written before the terrible shooting incident. The argument therein not only obtains, but acquires urgency given what has happened.

When Mao Zedong penned his essay ‘On Contradiction’ in July 1937, he was tackling a practical problem. The theoretical part of the essay was to provide philosophical support for the practical problem; the military threat from Japan, which had declared war against China. The Second Sino-Japanese War, which began on July 7, 1937 and continued until September 1945, constituted the China theatre in the wider Pacific front of World War II.

The war became an inflection point for China. Before then, for an entire decade, Chinese Communists had fought Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists. The Communists were chased and killed in a bloody civil war and paid a heavy price. But after Japan invaded China and threatened both Communists and Nationalists, what were the Communists to do?

The dogmatic among the Communists wanted to consider the Nationalists as an internal threat while looking at Japan as an external enemy. That meant fighting two adversaries, an untenable military-strategic position. This was the practical problem Mao faced. But he needed a theoretical argument to explain what was at stake. That was the genesis of On Contradiction.

Mao’s argument, relevant to our purpose, was the premise that “There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist.” But, as he argued, this concept of “contradiction” is not static; it’s dynamic.

“The fundamental contradiction becomes more and more intensified as it passes from one stage to another in the lengthy process. In addition, among the numerous major and minor contradictions which are determined or influenced by the fundamental contradiction, some become intensified, some are temporarily or partially resolved or mitigated, and some new ones emerge; hence the process is marked by stages.”

In essence, Mao wanted the Communists to distinguish in a complex situation between what was a principal contradiction and what [are/were] the aspects of a principal contradiction. Overtime, and given the changing situations, “the principal and non-principal [secondary] aspects of a contradiction can transform themselves into each other, and the nature of it changes accordingly”.

The baseline, at a practical level, was simple: where did the principal contradiction lie: between Communists and Nationalists or a united China front against Japan, the external enemy? Mao was clear. It was the latter. He was calling on Communists to push the internal contradiction to a secondary place and present a united, Communist-Nationalist front to Japan.

Let’s come home now. Broadly speaking, there are three actors in the arena: former prime minister Imran Khan and his party; the current coalition government; and, the army. A fourth, the judiciary, is important but irrelevant to our present purpose.

In the 2018 elections, after the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz had fallen foul of the army and Nawaz Sharif himself had been disqualified through a verdict that remains controversial, Khan’s party emerged as the largest with 116 National Assembly seats followed by 64 and 43 respectively for PML-N and the PPPP. Khan needed 56 seats to form the government. Those seats were arranged for him (a fact he has himself indirectly acknowledged more than once).

With the PML-N in the opposition and hounded by NAB cases, Sharif decided to go on the offensive while in exile in London (even as his younger brother’s coterie within the party tried to work out a deal with the army). Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, Maryam Nawaz, thus began attacking the army, directly and indirectly.

This went on until in August 2021, tension between Khan and the army chief boiled over in relation to the appointment of a new Director-General Inter-Services Intelligence. By most evidence, that was the turning point. The opposition parties which, till then, had been pressed for space, decided to go on the offensive. The only way to oust Khan was to (a) deprive him of the majority and (b) show majority themselves and form the government.

Khan’s weakest link was the PTI allies in the government and also some disgruntled elements within the PTI. But the numbers game — horse trading — depended on how the army and its intelligence agencies would react. Would they, at the last minute, come to Khan’s rescue? The signal, finally, to the PDM was to go ahead: the “selectors” won’t interfere. Khan knew this; hence his pejorative public references to “neutrals” and neutrality. We now know that when the numbers game began, he tried to get the army to side with him and even offered the current army chief the carrot of an extension.

Since his ouster, he has been on the road. His standard speech attempts to discredit the army’s top brass, especially the army chief. His supporters and troll farms then greatly amplify the vitriol in their social media posts. At the same time, Khan has also been privately reaching out to the army chief, a fact acknowledged (and defended) by leaders of his own party.

This is the point where we must return to Mao. PML-N’s elder Sharif and his daughter attacked the army when out of power; Khan and his supporters are doing the same now that they are out of power. When in power, Khan and his ministers used to blast the PML-N/PDM for attacking the army. The PML-N/PDM leaders are now blasting Khan and the PTI for undermining the army.

While the army needs to do some deep thinking and ponder the long trajectory of political interference that has plunged the institution into this gutter and which now threatens its integrity and cohesiveness, the political parties too need to figure out where the principal contradiction lies. Is it between PDM and PTI? Or is it between the political players, regardless of their differences, and the external actor that exploits their differences?

Khan and his supporters talk about changing the status quo. Regardless of whether or not they can do it, they need to figure out the process and its various stages. If the principal contradiction is between the political actors and the army, then Khan and the PDM need a united front: i.e., the political actors need to deprive the army of the space the latter finds and exploits when they are at loggerheads.

If, however, Khan persists in rejecting other political actors while also running down the army, he faces a two-front situation. Mao found that untenable. Khan will too.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies