Daily Times

On April 30, 2012, the Youm-e-Shuhada (Martyrs’ Day) was commemorated in Pakistan. Nations around the world observe a memorial or war veterans’ day to honour the soldiers fallen defending the country. In addition to such remembrance remarks, the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvaiz Kayani used this solemn occasion to make a speech, which had clear political and geopolitical overtones.

Alluding to the Abbottabad episode where the US Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden and the NATO attack on the Salala post, he said, “Despite the unprecedented sacrifices of Pakistani people and the armed forces, some external forces have failed to acknowledge it. The resultant situation has put the whole nation under mental stress, and as a result, we were forced to review bilateral relations with them. We expect that others would also respect our sovereignty and dignity.” He then added, “Whatever national policy is chalked out keeping in line with the national aspirations and sentiments, the armed forces shall follow that.” Regarding domestic affairs, General Kayani had this to say, “The Constitution of Pakistan has clearly delineated the responsibilities and roles of the national institutions. It is now our responsibility that we resolve our issues, while remaining within the constitutional limits, in a manner it increases respect and dignity of both our country and ourselves.”

I am not sure that after Osama bin Laden’s lair was found a stone’s throw away from the Pakistan Army’s premier training academy how one laments, with a straight face, the world casting aspersions — as Hillary Clinton did earlier this week — on Pakistan’s sincerity in fighting terrorism. But more importantly, how can the department — no, it is not an institution — that has singlehandedly committed more violations of the constitution than the absolute worst of the politicians around lecture others on their constitutional role unless such advice was meant for the officers under his command? It is unknown if the general has done some introspection for the role he himself played when his boss General Pervez Musharraf defaced the constitution for a decade.

Yet one seasoned editor-analyst found Kayani’s words significant enough to celebrate, on his show, the armed forces as the champions of Pakistan’s national interest. When a widely respected intellectual challenged, in a social media exchange, the analyst’s remarks, the latter backtracked and stated that his comment was in the specific context of the incident(s) the general had cited. Then this otherwise liberal analyst laid the blame for a national interest narrative gone awry squarely at the doorsteps of the civilians. Still, it is a fair discussion to have. The gist of such argument is that because of the alleged corruption of the present civilian government they cannot take the bull — or should I say bully — by the horns and therefore abdicate national security and foreign policy matters to the army.

The most important factors for any political dispensation to apportion due authority to itself are the political capital accumulated on the election campaign trail, legitimacy acquired through the ballot, and at the very least, a simple majority to form and run a government. In the post-Ziaul Haq era, all democratic setups except one have invariably been denied a comfortable position in parliament. From day one, civilian governments are under an existential threat, either due to a fractured mandate or from the outside forces, which now include not just the street or the security establishment but the judiciary as well. In established democracies, the first hundred days are a benchmark to see if the incumbents have started to put campaign promises into practice. But in Pakistan, every single civilian government could barely keep its head above water in this period, let alone take hard decisions or harder yet, take on the army.

The politicians today may be corrupt or inept but even when they were not so, all sorts of machinations were deployed to push them off the steering wheel. It would be pertinent to note Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s double-barrel assault on the politicians and media as he put into place his vision of the Islam-based ideology of Pakistan. There are interesting similarities between Ayub Khan’s India-centric vision of an ideological state and Kayani’s obsession with India. Also, a leading politician of the era, the charismatic Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, had a view of US-Pakistan relations not much different than today’s Pakistan People’s Party or the Awami National Party. Premier Suhrawardy was a proponent of a pro-western foreign policy also, but an arch critic of Ayub Khan’s emphasis on the ideological state building using a chauvinistic disdain for ‘Hindu India’ and Islam as the cement. Yes, contrary to the popular belief, Ayub Khan deployed Islam wherever needed, including using a fatwa against Ms Fatima Jinnah, declaring a woman head of state as un-Islamic. Needless to say, Suhrawardy was ousted in a coup and subsequently barred from politics via Ayub Khan’s 1962 Elected Bodies Disqualification Order (EBDO) for allegedly working against the ‘national interest’. Ms Jinnah lost the rigged presidential election to Ayub Khan in 1964. Lest we forget, there was no financial corruption blemish on Suhrawardy or Ms Jinnah.

Robust democracy and a free media are necessary for each other. To complete its chokehold on the national interest narrative, the Ayub Khan regime most shamelessly muzzled the press and took over, at gunpoint, the independent Progressive Papers Limited of Mian Iftikharuddin, which included the dailies Pakistan Times (PT) and Imroze, and periodical Lail-o-Nahar. In a hard-hitting piece that remains a must-read for even today’s analysts, the PT editor Mazhar Ali Khan later wrote in Feroz Ahmed’s Pakistan Forum:

“It will not be easy for our future historians to determine which single action of the self-appointed president and his government of courtiers did the greatest harm to the national interest, for they will have a wide field to survey. Many will probably conclude that the dictatorship’s gravest crime was its deliberate destruction of press freedom, because so many other evils flowed from this act of denying to the people of Pakistan one of their fundamental rights. It is, therefore, pertinent to recall the Ayub regime’s first step towards this fascist aim, namely, its attack on the Progressive Papers, an institution created under the patronage of the Quaid-e-Azam.”

Debate about the national interest narrative cannot be held in just the Salala and Abbottabad context. What undermined politicians and the media has a long history that ought to be discussed.

(To be continued)

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki