Ejaz Haider

Pakistan needs a second Charter of Democracy

Since his ouster from power through a no-confidence vote, former prime minister Imran Khan has again taken to agitational politics, trying to galvanise his support base and threatening to march on Islamabad, even if the country is plunged into anarchy.

The centrepiece of his campaign has two salient points, one old, the other new: the old is the reference to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party as entities led by corrupt dynasts; the new is the allegation that he has been ousted because of a conspiracy hatched by the United States.

The first, old point is correct. The PMLN and the PPP are led by dynasts and while the families seem to have avoided accountability, they are widely presumed to have benefited from being in power, accumulating wealth and stashing it abroad.

The second point is a leap of imagination. Pakistan’s ambassador to the US did send a cipher to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the contents of a meeting with Donald Lu, a US diplomat serving as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. It is also correct that Mr Lu used language that was undiplomatic and expressed anger towards Khan. But to use those facts to charge the then Opposition (now the government) with treason and to accuse the US of being behind Khan’s ouster is to venture beyond fact into the land of fable.

Writing in Dawn on April 16, one of Pakistan’s most celebrated diplomats Riaz Mohammad Khan analysed the controversy as follows: “In Pakistan… foreign conspiracy theories are a staple of popular politics and perhaps a convenient explanation for manifest domestic policy failures.” He goes on to write, “The Imran Khan-led wave of populism has polarised Pakistan, and further degraded our political culture. His populism has the familiar mix of religion and anti-Americanism.”

Ambassador Khan is not someone to be taken lightly. Given his vast and varied experience of diplomacy, his authorship, his erudition and his sharp analytical mind — he was trained as a mathematician before he joined the foreign service — his insights are invaluable and those among the educated who believe Khan’s conspiracy theory would do well to re-evaluate their argument.

For Khan, however, this is a calculated move. He continues to present himself as the one and only true leader of Pakistan, a paragon of virtues protecting the people from a bunch of rogue leaders hell bent on destroying this country. The truth, as always, is more complicated.

Nobody condones corruption. The question though is whether Pakistan’s problems can be reduced to corruption and only corruption. And in that regard, studies have shown that rent-seeking is a complex issue and cannot be reduced to the kind of sloganeering favoured by the PTI.

Take for instance the 2000 work by Mushtaq H Khan et al, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia. The book looks at case studies from Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia and South Korea to conclude that “conventional models of rent-seeking are unable to explain how it can drive decades of rapid growth in some countries, and at other times be associated with spectacular economic crises.”

I am not an economist and even if I were, experts can take different approaches to different puzzles. My point is simple: political sloganeering is always reductive and deliberately so. But by positing the problem of Pakistan as Khan versus the Rest, the PTI has destroyed any space for a dialogue.

It is often said that politics is about compromise, or in more academic terms, the aggregation of interests. But there can be no aggregation of interests if only one perspective is claimed to be valid. Pakistan is a very diverse country, not just ethno-linguistically but in many other ways. As such, the interests of its people are often contradictory. Thus the only way to evolve a broadly acceptable social balance is through dialogue and compromise.

Khan’s politics, up until now, has sought to do exactly the opposite. What he seeks is a playground where there are no opposing players and there is no goalie. If it means obliterating the Rest, so be it. That’s not politics; that’s Trumpism, to use a current metaphor from the divisive American politics.

The irony is that Khan’s agitational rhetoric notwithstanding, he knows how important compromises are. He rose to power in 2018 by making compromises. His allies were delivered to him. His cabinet housed many of them. He had no ostensible problem with the arrangement when they provided the numbers to put him into the Prime Minister’s Office. His conscience now has only awoken when he no longer has the numbers to govern.

Differences aside, there are many common strands in how one handles domestic politics and how one has to manage interstate relations. Take Turkiye. As I write this, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) is in Ankara. In April, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia. It was his first visit there in five years. Three weeks before Erdogan’s visit, a Turkish court decided to transfer the trial of 26 Saudis accused of killing Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia, a decision bitterly criticised by rights groups.

What does this mean? Erdogan, who had taken the lead in mounting a campaign against MbS and vowed to shed light on the killing, decided on an abrupt about-face for pragmatic reasons. The details are many and outside the scope of this article, but the point is simple: practical considerations of statecraft trump other factors, including moral outrage at a gruesome murder.

But Turkiye is not the only one to reach out to MbS. The US President Joe Biden is another. As a CNN report put it, Joe Biden, “who came into office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ over Khashoggi’s murder” and “released an intelligence report last year that directly accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of orchestrating Khashoggi’s killing” has also decided “on a dramatic about-face” to “reset” the relationship.

While official US sources say that Biden will raise the issue of the killing with MbS, it’s clear that other factors far outweigh his concern with that killing. CNN quoted a senior US official as saying, “Both sides have decided that for the sake of achieving peace and stability in the Middle East, we need to move past it.”

Khan himself, while in office, had to make such compromises. After Riyadh raised objections to the Kuala Lumpur summit and the presence of Iran in that summit, Khan visited Riyadh and then announced his withdrawal from the summit. As he learnt then, angering the House of Saud was not in Pakistan’s interest, despite Islamabad’s excellent relations with Ankara and Kuala Lumpur.

He needs to adopt the same approach to domestic politics. After the bitter tussle between the PMLN and the PPP in the 90s, both parties realised that a zero-sum approach did not work for either of them. The Charter of Democracy between Ms. Bhutto and Mr Sharif was a result of that realisation. Given Pakistan’s many challenges, Khan needs to be part of a second Charter of Democracy. That’s the only way to establish the rules of the game.

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