A nation in the grip of madness
The only direction the country seems to be going is round and round and round in dizzying circles of despair. There is nothing merry about this merry-go-round.
It is hard to see how Pakistan would come out of the political quagmire that it is stuck in. To some this might not be an issue. What’s new, they would ask. New or not, you can’t govern a state much less deliver to people if it remains at war with itself.
The Establishment’s idea that they can somehow create a bypass around complex political gridlocks that Imran’s fall created by simply going through an electoral exercise has not taken off. Not that the government is tanking. Or the country is in the grip of popular revolts. None of that. Five budgets have been presented and passed. Assemblies are operational. And the PTI for all its sizzling rhetoric and cannon-fires of Ali Amin Gandapur, is internally so conflicted that it takes a commissioner’s signature to deflate their “biggest show of strength in Islamabad”. So yes, things look to be in control. But this “control” is an illusion.
The judicial and Establishment wrestling match is widening by the day. It has divided the judges too. Each is intent on inflicting body blows on the other in the hope of winning the final round. Both are bleeding shame. The global perspective of this and related state of affairs are becoming sad commentaries. I don’t buy the argument that the Congress resolution or the assessment of the UN Woking Group on Arbitrary Detention are unimportant censures. They are important. They are the new lens the world is using to look at where this nuclear power stands internally. They are setting the long-term matrix of our global merit. If anyone doesn’t understand this, he needs to take a cold shower and wake up.
The government’s credibility and approval are touching the junk level. Its taxploitation of the poor and the salaried class and the vast range of exemptions it built into the budget for the country’s mega elite has made it an object of national hate. The government comes across as heartless as shameless in defending a dreadful document of a dreary year ahead for the vast majority of Pakistanis. On top of it, as cases dealing with reserved assembly seats and those before the tribunals about electoral fraud and rigging mature, its precarious situation becomes even more fraught. It is hanging by a tenuous thread. More and more it is relying on the Establishment’s steel-framed support. The Establishment believes that this arrangement can stay, and given another year, can actually justify its existence.
If the Establishment had any history of reading the room right, one would trust this belief. But nearly eight decades are a long testimony to facts otherwise. Also, the Establishment does not control everything. It might think otherwise, but it doesn’t. The PTI’s slicing of the army chief’s image continues apace. Their trolls, their henchmen in the media and in other portals of power, in Washington and London, have relentlessly attacked the army chief General Asim Munir in an unprecedented campaign to defile and defame him. The PTI in popular discourse has been able to successfully turn political powerplay into a clash of two persons, Asim and Imran, while the counter-punch from the government and the Establishment struggles to hit the target that it is all about Imran’s desire to become the army’s darling again.
This exhausting fracas is now the national equivalent of Covid—you can’t escape it anywhere. It is in the air you breath; it sits atop every stone you put your foot on.
And yet this is not how it was supposed to be. Pakistan was supposed to be stabler, calmer, more focused, more hopeful and more cohesive after the polls. It was supposed to be detoxicated and re-oriented. More investment friendly and globally relevant. It was supposed to be going from point A to point B. But as things stand today, the only direction the country seems to be going is round and round and round in dizzying circles of despair. There is nothing merry about this merry-go-round. It is madness without method. It is enervating an edgy and anxious nation.