Daily Times

Raid the court. Break in the windows. Beat the lawyers. Bash the Ex-PM getting his biometrics done. Smash the court offices. Injure the attendants. These are visuals of the arrest of Imran Khan. By no stretch of the imagination in any civilized democracy can you imagine this boom, bust, bang gangster pickup operation inside a court building. Is this a democracy? Not really as the current government leaders are mocking the main pillars of democracy daily. Some of their daily statements- What Elections? What Constitution? What Supreme Court? What laws? These are some samples of messages being relayed from the House of Lawmakers. This is the Islamic Democratic Republic of Pakistan. It may be a republic, but whether it is a democratic or a banana republic is the unfortunate debate that has marred the country’s sociopolitical ideology. Some call it a disguised autocracy. Some call it a dynasty. Some call it a hybrid model. Some just shake their head and say that is how it has been for so many decades. Many try to equate what is happening in the last year with what was happening in the earlier three and half years. Facts speak a different analysis.

With so much talk about how the ideology is polluted, it is important to understand what a banana republic is really like. The Wikipedia describes Banana Republic as a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources. A typical banana republic is a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites. It is called the banana republic because in the early twentieth-century Latin American countries like Honduras and Costa Rica were dependent on the large plantation of bananas that were exploited by American trading companies like United Fruit Ltd more famous as the Chiquita brand. By controlling the banana plantation they controlled and ruled the country. This pattern with some modifications is also apparent in Pakistan. Such countries are independent but controlled. These countries have their laws and constitution but are governed by the “Power Law”. These countries may be democracies but are under autocrats. Pakistan and Pakistanis are now in the Hamlet dilemma of “to be or not to be.” The choice to “let it be” has resulted in the following:

1. Marginalized and Crushed- In a banana republic the poor are the target. They are constantly exploited. They are constantly abused. They are constantly misinformed. The government is ruled through a collusion between the state and favoured economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury. This creates skewed economies. Such an imbalanced economy creates unsustainable and uneven economic development of the country causing fiscal deficits and currency devaluation rendering the country ineligible for international development credit. This is exactly what has happened in Pakistan. The sugar barons and the property dealers dominate the parliamentarian electoral processes. They make heavy investments in the election process to win them. The return on this investment is through policies that give them billions of rupees of subsidies at the cost of the development investment in the masses. Honduras’ example is relevant. There was a military takeover as the political economy created instability and mass poverty. With debt and poverty piling the country was run by foreign and local banana barons. This is the situation in Pakistan. The middle class is now pushed into the poverty circle and struggling to feed and educate their children. The parliamentarians are busy making laws to marginalize the accountability institutions be it NAB or Supreme Court. This is the test of the public to continue to let it be or not to be.

Pakistan and Pakistanis are now in the Hamlet dilemma of “to be or not to be.”

2. Isolated and humiliated- Pakistan was always a geo-strategically very important country. It was located as a gateway to Central Asia. It was an entry into the largest single market in the world known as the Subcontinent. It had one of the world’s biggest youth bulges. It was a foil to India. It was an ally of China. These features made Pakistan a country that mattered. The present government and its backers have made Pakistan almost a nonentity. In 2019 and 2021 Pakistan was playing the role of a mediator between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Today Pakistan is not even an observer of the reset of the relationship between the two countries. In 2018 and 2019, the Middle East heads i.e. MBS and MBZ not only bailed out Pakistan but also visited and announced massive investment projects. Today, they are not willing to provide any money or any assurances of a bail-out. Pakistan played a role in leading the fight against Islamophobia in the world and two OIC conferences were held in 2022 after a gap of 15 years. Today Pakistan is not even mentioned in the major developments of OIC. Pakistan has made itself isolated as they have taken only one initiative in this whole year and that is to ask for money either on the pretext of floods or on IMF conditionalities. This has made our friendly countries avoid us, our alliances overlook us, and our enemies rubbish us the way the Indian Foreign minister did to our Foreign minister at the SCO summit in Goa.

3. Fighting the external and wars within- A country dangerously without friends not just across borders but across regions needs to be really focused and united internally to combat the looming external dangers. Not so. Sadly the present regime has waged a war within. They have taken on the most popular political party with a vengeance to politically and legally strangulate and crush PTI. They are openly declaring war on the Supreme Court. They are blatantly ordering the Election Commission to violate the Constitution. They have told off State Bank. All this has to lead to a reaction and the reaction will be proportionate to their unpopularity. And it has been. PTI Chairman’s arrest within the court just broke all lines. As they cracked down on the protestors through the mass use of Rangers and ammunition, the public took the law into their own hands. Women, children, and elders all defiant and desperate took their rage out on buildings, installations etc. The consequences that we had been predicting and debating about for months, happened. Anarchy with the symptoms of a civil war was witnessed.

You can win external wars against the toughest of enemies. We proved that in February 2019 when the Balakot attack by India was successfully foiled and Indian might was reduced to an appeasing pilot who was almost nonchalantly returned to them. But to fight your people, even if they are a few thousand, is a different story. That is war if you win, you lose, and if you lose, you lose public support. This is the present political precipice the institutions and the public finds themselves in. As the shutdowns, crackdowns, bans, and closed-downs proliferate, so does the resolve in the public to defy respond and retaliate. The final showdown is looming- Let us hope that the authorities do not go “bananas” and take on a public that is willing to defeat the forces they believe are trying to convert the Islamic Republic of Pakistan into a banana republic.

The writer is a columnist, consultant, coach, and an analyst and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail,com. She tweets at @AndleebAbbas