Daily Times

The director-general of ISPR, Major General Asif Ghafoor, said, “Pakistan army is an impartial institution, and its support lies with a democratically elected government” (Sama Digital, November 1, 2019). It is a benign statement but history reminds us not to trust the words. They are not neutral, especially when delivered by the dominant quarters. They convey a definite message usually with altogether different meanings.

Words, Sartre said, are loaded pistols, and thoughts are bullets; they can fire or assume the face of Janus, the double-faced Roman god that looks into the future and past simultaneously. The word impartial is one among those. It has a definite history, a certain background and vivid consequences, Endured by the subalterns, it needs further elucidation. According to the Cambridge dictionary, impartial means, “not supporting any of the sides involved in an argument.”

The emphasis of the director-general is on impartiality, on not supporting any of the sides involved in an argument, while in the same breath he gave the institutional support to the democratically-elected government, directly in conflict with the other side; contesting its legitimacy of getting elected by the popular vote. For the opposition, the rulers are the “chosen ones” whose “promised land” exists on the other side of the democratic field.

Despite becoming the part of the international capitalistic order, Pakistan has yet to develop capitalistic relations of production

The statement analysed through an objective historic perspective turns out to be an oxymoron but such perspective is dismissed as either linguistic wizardry or an attempt to draw farfetched meanings from an ordinary statement, meaning nothing more than the obvious. But are we not experiencing a sweeping change in the language where meanings of the highflying words such as freedom, equality, justice and democracy have altered so completely and effectively that they have turned into their opposites? When Orwell introduced the terminology of “war-is-peace,” and “freedom-is-slavery,” his thoughts did not appear from a void. His keen observation of the world where parties working for capitalism guise as socialists and the despotic regimes recognised as democrats provided him with ample raw material.

We are living in a world where opposites are reconciled, where tanks think (think-tanks) and people perish but markets live, exchange relations and not the human relations are the only sanctified relations no matter what is exchanged–a scripture or a nuke. If the domination of the hegemonic force remains unchallenged, every massacre finds its justification; every ghetto a rationale and every mass slaughter a definite logic. It leads to another question in the world of domination and self-preservation. Is it possible to remain impartial, especially when one is the part of the same conflicting society/world; where one’s meat is other’s poison and individual’s or organisational interests can only be achieved at the cost of the repressed majority?

Is it possible to remain impartial when Kashmir turns into a concentration camp, Palestine into a ghetto and the world into Dante’s inferno for the wretched of the earth? Is it possible to be impartial when Saudi forces annihilate nearly a million innocent unarmed citizens in Yemen or when imperialism destroys the oldest civilisation of Babylon with its cities and the inhabitants? Alternatively, when the dreadful caliph of Turkey, in his dizziness or diminishing power, plays havoc with Kurds, how can we remain impartial? Dante reserved the darkest place in hell for those who remained neutral in times of such crises.

On Kashmir’s issue, when the world, including proverbial Ummah, declined to support Pakistan, the agony of being alone and lonely was obvious in both the masses and the otherwise utterly numb ruling quarter, indifferent to the plight of its subjects. The Biblical phrase of “With us or against us,” works for the powerful and not for those suffering the fate of Sisyphus, chosen by the pious rulers to inflict upon the masses, which has also incidentally come to haunt them. Pakistan found itself standing in the world’s community nearly alone; dazed, stupefied and even stultified.

However, this gives an insight into one’s own house, crumbling like a pack of cards. Despite becoming the part of the international capitalistic order, Pakistan has yet to develop capitalistic relations of production. Its bourgeoisie could not expand itself through the competitive process. Barring a small period when the civilian capitalist class developed, the capital flew to the nest of an armed bourgeoisie, which was inherently feudal. Hence, the initial spirit of idealism, associated with capitalism, failed to blossom in Pakistan. It used religious and judicial tools to inhibit the land reforms as it sprawled itself into the light industry. Its content became capitalist, but its form remained predominantly feudal.

The saga began when the first commander-in-chief of the army was “promoted by the then Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, a controversial promotion over several senior officers” (US, State Department, 2015) and later installed as defence and home minister while he was still in uniform. He paved the way for the army to seize political power from the civilian elite; apolitical became overtly political. By bringing the country under the ominous shadows of the US, he did to the country what Faust did to himself. Barring the few years of a so-called socialist stint of the 1970s, which did more harm to socialism than any previous government did, the praetorian guards’ urge for power and process of privatisation started in his era never stopped.

The later coups cleaved the emerging bourgeoisie into a powerful military segment and a weaker layer of civil capitalists, and the latter immediately started to assert itself. In recent times, the internal capitalistic struggle has become intense and overt but unlike Turkey, where Erdogan, with no enemy, real or imagined, threatening his borders in sight, successfully sidelined the army, conditions in Pakistan are not as favourable. A few heads, including the head of the once favourite primer, rolled and another Lilliputian, stepped into power, not through majority but the alleged plurality status. The Fuhrer’s tragedy kept repeating its horrors on the world’s stage.

The legitimacy crisis in Pakistan remains an inherent dilemma with most of the governments ruling the state. The higher judiciary sanctified the military coups while the alleged engineered civilian coups survive with the backing of the guards. To promote the dominant interests, every surgical bypass performed on the body politics borrowed the hackneyed mantra of guarding the best interest of the nation, as if the class interests of rulers and the ruled were common and some monolithic entity of a nation existed. No one cared to ask the real stakeholders’ opinion but the jargon of guarding their interest echoed until the drumbeater finally eclipsed in the dustbin of history.

To bewitch the people, every new government uses new catchwords and jargons as its currency; restoration of order, ruling in the name of people or prophet, creating a corruption-free society are some worth mentioning. The media help to engrave these jargons into the human psyche; public opinion becomes a commodity; language turns into a tool of marketing and prostituting the opinion. Such a devalued language is not trustworthy and must be viewed with suspicion.

If the above statement is scrutinised in this light, is it possible to call it benign? Is it a message of intimidation and glorification, appealing to the reason by the command that “they are rational enough to build the tanks and people should be rational enough to yield (Horkheimer)” and conform to their version of impartiality?

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian-Frankfurt School)