The Dark Reality of India depicted in the film Jawan

 

India's Quest for the UN Veto: Syed Akbaruddin

 

The use of fear to persuade Pakistan

 

India's International Position

 

Tarek Fatah - RIP. How right he was about Imran Khan over 10 years ago

 

Events in Lahore explained

 

Who gains from attacking Imran Khan?

 

Pakistan: Ironies of Liberation

by Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Will November prove to be the cruelest month of all? It all depends on the answers to some burning questions. Will the COAS, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, go home on 29th November, 2022, as he has pledged several times, or will some extraordinary development “compel” him to stay on? Will Imran Khan’s long march of thousands end with a whimper or a bang (literally)? Will Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif enter into negotiations to end civil strife by setting a mutually acceptable date for the next general elections? What role will the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Umar Bandial, play in mediating or exacerbating political conflict?


​With less than one month to go, General Bajwa’s departure is clouded by the reluctance of the PDM government to announce his successor. Just as rumours abounded earlier about Imran Khan’s offer of an extension to the COAS in exchange for help in defeating the vote of no-confidence against him launched by the opposition in March – now proven true – it is no secret that the PDM leadership would like to scratch his back in exchange for help in warding off the looming threat from the PTI. Even Imran Khan has suggested that if the PDM government can be packed off this month and caretakers installed, General Bajwa may stay on as COAS until after the elections have returned a new government to office. Thus, despite his avowed “apolitical” stance, if push comes to shove during the PTI’s long march, it is not inconceivable that General Bajwa may be “compelled” to step in, pry apart the two warring sides, knock some sense into them and gain an extension in tenure by virtue of his “good deed”. That would open the door to an early election rather than a late one. Under the circumstances, CJP Bandial might see the wisdom of approving another extension for General Bajwa until a new government is installed after the elections.

​Much will therefore depend on how Imran Khan’s long march pans out in the next week or two. It has begun on a soft note, partly because Imran knows that, after the DGISI’s unprecedented public intervention, the Miltablishment could take off its gloves if he crosses their red lines again, and partly because he is still hoping that the PDM government will succumb to the threat of violence and open the door to negotiations that fulfil his objectives. Both sides are propagating their intent to fight despite admitting pressure to talk.

Significantly, too, both parties are begging CJP Bandial to take their side. Imran Khan wants to march and the PDM government wants to stop him in his tracks. Khan insists his marchers will remain peaceful but Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, has offered evidence of the PTI’s intentions to incite violence. The CJP says that the PTI has a right to march but notes his power to stop it at any time. Meanwhile, the good judge is exploiting this opportunity to browbeat the government and pack the court with handpicked junior judges. The threat of blocking the acquittal of Maryam Nawaz and outlawing the amended NAB law that has reprieved the top leaders of the PDM has sent the government scurrying for compromise, even to the extent of sacrificing its law minister, Azam Tarar, who was compelled to vote in favour of CJP Bandial’s nominees in the Judicial Commission against the interests of the bar which he has long represented.

Another struggle is manifestly unfolding in the background. At least five top generals are vying for the top slot in the army on November 29th when General Bajwa is scheduled to doff his uniform. If he doesn’t do so because of some extraordinary development, they will all go home before he does. So they have a vested interest in forestalling violent conflict, keeping Imran Khan at bay and showing their chief to the door.

It is a perverse comment on the state of Pakistan that the two institutions that are supposed to be “politically neutral” – the army and the judiciary – have become the most intrusive and controversial. Worse, their heads are flaunting their unaccountable powers and prejudices without restraint.

​The double irony built into the situation should not be lost on us, too.

Even as the army high command is insisting that it has become apolitical and neutral and intends to stay that way in the future, both the PTI and PDM are knocking on its door for salvation. The former is threatening them and the latter is cajoling them. Under the circumstances, the probability is that the generals will not shy away from upholding the “national interest” when the state is threatened by instability and destabilization in the face of financial bankruptcy, as always.

The other irony lies in the nature of the unprecedented popular attack on the army’s political interventionism launched by Imran Khan. In normal circumstances, this would be viewed as a belated but welcome development to strengthen constitutional democracy. Indeed, this is the common thread running through the long struggles of liberals, leftists, democrats, human and women’s rights groups and ethnic/sub-nationalist, religious minorities on the periphery. The problem has arisen because the current struggle for “real liberation” led by the PTI is not aimed at defanging the army to strengthen multi-party constitutional democracy but at sharpening its claws to clamp down on the PTI’s political opponents to entrench populist one party fascism.

Not so long ago, the people of Pakistan passionately backed the Lawyers Movement for Independence of the Judiciary as a veritable “revolution” in the offing. A decade later, we have been lumped with the most unaccountable and politically biased judiciary in history as exemplified by the likes of ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Saqib Nisar and Asif Khosa. Today, we are in the throes of another such populist upsurge against another repressive state institution that threatens to further enslave us instead of liberating us.

Imran Khan has Pakistani army ducking & defending. Why it’s a historic moment for the subcontinent

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

Since its founding, Pakistan’s army has built a consistent record of launching wars on India and losing. It is a record of unblemished consistency. There is, however, another battlefield where it has an equally consistent record of winning. Which is where it is staring at defeat. We will elaborate on this in just a bit.

On fighting and losing wars with India, there will obviously be some nitpicking. The tough fact is, after so many wars, this army has lost almost half of Pakistan (Bangladesh), destroyed its polity, institutions, economy and entrepreneurship, and driven out its talent. Finally, it has even less of Kashmir (think Siachen) than it started out with.

So where is it that its record of winning has been equally consistent and it is now on the retreat?

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Check out this entire press conference by Lt Gen. Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, the serving chief of the almighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which vanquished the Soviet and American powers, the KGB and the CIA, in Afghanistan. Chaperoned by Lt Gen. Babar Iftikhar, the chief of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), he has spoken for nearly an hour and a half. All of this was invested in defending himself, the ISI, his chief and the army.

Now, never mind that Elon Musk has stolen that metaphor for posterity, please allow us also to use it: Let that sink in. This is the ISI that all of Pakistan both loved and feared, loved and loathed, that friend and foe held in awe. It only had to wink, nod and sometimes nudge, and most of the Pakistani media would fall in line. If you didn’t, you might end up in jail, exile, a corpse in a gutter or in a strange land. In some cases, all of these. Think Arshad Sharif, the former ARY anchor. He was fired and exiled, as was his boss. Sharif turned up dead in Kenya, apparently shot by the police in a matter of mistaken identity. If you believe that, you must be high on something totally illegal.

Now, we had the ISI chief, institutionally among the most powerful men in the world at any time, at a press conference with a hand-picked friendly audience (most of the respected publications were excluded). Usually, his word and his chief’s were an order for Pakistan’s media, politicians, and often also the judiciary. The chief of ISPR was his constant messenger.

Now, both of them, speaking on behalf of their institution, were claiming victimhood. When the Pakistani army goes to the media complaining about a political leader who they evidently fear, you know that its politics has taken a historic turn.
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Pakistan’s army is brilliant at scrapping with its political class and winning. Now it fears defeat at the hands of its politicians too. To that extent, Imran Khan might be on the verge of a victory that would mean even more in political terms than his team’s cricket World Cup win in 1992. If the Pakistani army can finally be defeated by a popular, if populist, civilian force, it’s a history-defining moment for the subcontinent.

It’s history-defining because an institution that was never denied its supreme power except for a few years after the 1971 defeat is now seeking public sympathy with its back to the wall under a mere civilian’s onslaught. Its word used to be a command for any government of the day. It could hire, fire, jail, exile, or murder prime ministers serving, former and prospective. To understand that, you do not have to go far.

In 2007, it looked as if Benazir Bhutto was on the ascendant, after her return from her second long exile (the first return was in 1986, which I had covered in this India Today cover story from Pakistan). She was assassinated despite so many warnings that her life was in danger. Nobody has been punished yet. It’s buried in Pakistan’s history of conspiracies and eternal mysteries like so many others. Her party’s government was kneecapped and her husband subsequently reduced to an inconsequential, titular president.

Nawaz Sharif came back with a comfortable majority. He too grew “delusional”, from his army’s point of view, in beginning to believe that he was a real prime minister. By 2018, this army, under a chief he had appointed, had conspired and contrived to get rid of him, jail and exile him. It ensured that his party didn’t get a majority in the election that followed. In the process, they also built, strengthened and employed Pakistan’s most regressive Sunni Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.
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Imran Khan was then the army’s candidate, and does it matter if he fell short of a majority? The army and the ISI collected enough small parties and independents to give him a comfortable majority. Albeit at their sufferance. A majority was no issue for one seen as the boy of the boys.

Until, this ‘boy’ also began to believe that he was a real prime minister and was causing ‘discomfort’ at the army GHQ.

Worse, his delusions weren’t just domestic. He was now seeing himself as the new leader of the Islamic Ummah, a 21st-century Caliph of sorts in his own right. He was talking in shariat terms, bringing a Quranic curriculum, building a new agenda that was as Islamist as it was anti-West. Both of these alarmed the army.

In the same state of political ‘high’, Imran started to believe he now bossed the army. That’s how the first, and decisive, fights broke out over top-level appointments. The first was over the appointment of the new ISI chief. The army chief had his way with Nadeem Anjum and Imran lost out over his insistence on continuing with Lt Gen. Faiz Hameed. This fight was, however, like a crucial league match before the final — the appointment of the new chief in November.

Think about what is the one thread that’s common to this entire ugly story of intrigue, betrayal, and now it seems, assassination too? General Qamar Javed Bajwa has been the army chief through all of these years. Appointed by Nawaz Sharif who he later fired and exiled, given a three-year extension by Imran Khan who he first created and then got fired, and now challenged by him.

Over the past five decades, two great political families have fought for democracy in Pakistan in their own patchy ways, although mostly by keeping the army GHQ on their sides. Both, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are now tired and spent forces. One because of its shrinking footprint from Punjab, and the other because its only popular leader, Nawaz Sharif, is hesitant to leave the safety of exile in London and join the fight at home. Both are counting on the army to save their throne and skins.

This used to be business as usual. If the army was on your side, the world was yours in Pakistan. The reason these aren’t usual times is that today it is the army that’s staring at the greatest, scariest existential threat to its power and stature. This threat has come from a populist, riding democratic power. So what if it’s that often nutty and deeply flawed Imran Khan. Did we ever argue democracy is perfect?

THE PERFORMATIVE POLITICIAN

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Illustration by Abro



Populism is a way of framing political ideas that can be filled with a verity of ideologies (C. Mudde in Current History, 2014). These ideologies can come from the left or the right. Populism in itself is not a distinct ideology. It is a performative political style.

No matter where it’s coming from, it is manifested through a particular set of animated gestures, images, tones and symbols (B. Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism, 2016). At the core of it is a narrative containing two main ‘villains’: The ‘elites’ and ‘the other’. Elites are described as being corrupt. And ‘the other’ is demonised as being a threat to the beliefs and values of the ‘majority’.

Populists begin by glorifying the ‘besieged’ polity as noble. They then begin to frame the polity’s civilisation as ‘sacred’. Therefore, the mission to eradicate threats, in this context, becomes a sacred cause. The far-right parties in Europe want to protect Europe’s Christian identity from Muslim intruders. They see Muslim immigration to European countries as an invasion.

Yet, these far-right groups are largely secular. They do not propose the creation of a Christian theocracy. Instead, they understand modern European civilisation as the outcome of its illustrious Christian past. They frame the Muslim immigrant as ‘the other’ who has arrived from a lesser civilisation. So, according to far-right populists in Europe, the Muslim other — tolerated and facilitated by a political elite — starts to undermine the Christian values that aided European civilisations to become ‘great’.

Ironically, most far-right outfits in Europe that espouse such notions are largely critical of conventional Christian institutions. They see them as being too conservative towards modern European values. Far-right outfits are not overtly religious at all — even though their fiery populist rhetoric frames their cause as a sacred undertaking to protect the civilisational role of Christianity in shaping European societies.

Thus, European far-right populists adopt Christianity not as a theocratic-political doctrine, but as an identity marker to differentiate themselves from Muslims (Saving The People, ed. O. Roy, 2016). It is therefore naive to understand issues such as Islamophobia as a tussle between Christianity and Islam. Neither is it a clash between modernity and anti-modernity, as such.

The actions of some Islamist extremists, and the manner in which these were framed by popular media, made Muslim migrants in the West a community that could be easily moulded into a feared ‘other’ by populists. If one takes out the Muslim migrants from the equation, the core narrative of far-right populists will lose its sting.

Muslims in this regard have become ‘the other’ in India as well. Hindu nationalism is challenging the old, ‘secular’ political elite by claiming that this elite was serving Muslim interests to maintain its political hegemony, and that it was repressing values, beliefs and memories of a Hindu civilisation that was thriving before being invaded and dismantled by Muslim invaders.

Here too, the populist Hindu nationalists are not necessarily devout and pious. And when they are, then the actions in this respect are largely performative rather than doctrinal. That’s why, today, a harmless Hindu ritual and the act of emotionally or physically assaulting a Muslim, may carry similar performative connotations. For example, a militant Hindu nationalist mob attacking a Muslim can be conceived by the attackers as a sacred ritual.

Same is the case in Pakistan. The researcher Muhammad Amir Rana has conducted several interviews of young Islamist militants who were arrested and put in rehabilitation programmes. Almost all of them were told by their ‘handlers’ that self-sacrifice was a means to create an Islamic state/caliphate that would wipe out poverty, corruption and immorality, and provide justice. This idea was programmed into them to create a ‘self’ in relation to an opposite or ‘the other’. The other in this respect were heretics and infidels who were conspiring to destroy Islam.

When an Islamist suicide bomber explodes him/herself in public, or when extremists desecrate Ahmadiyya graves, or a mob attacks an alleged blasphemer, each one of these believe they are undertaking a sacred ritual that is not that different from the harmless ones. But Islamist militants are not populists. They have dogmatic doctrines or are deeply indoctrinated.

Not so, the populists. Populists are great hijackers of ideas. There’s nothing original or deep about them. Everything remains on the surface. Take, for instance, the recently ousted Pakistani PM Imran Khan. He unabashedly steals ideas from the left and the right. His core constituency, which is not so attuned to history, perceives these ideas as being entirely new. Everything he says or claims to have done, becomes ‘for the first time in the history of Pakistan.’

But being a populist, it wasn’t enough for Khan to frame his ‘struggle’ (against ‘corrupt elites’) as a noble cause. It needed to be manifested as a sacred conviction. So, from 2014 onwards, he increasingly began to lace his speeches with allusions of him fighting for justice and morality by treading a path laid out by Islam’s sacred texts and personalities. He then began to explain this undertaking as a ‘jihad’.

These were/are pure populist manoeuvres and entirely performative. Once the cause transformed into becoming a ‘jihad’, it not only required rhetoric culled from Islamist evangelists and then put in the context of a ‘political struggle’, but it also needed performed piety — carrying prayer beads, being constantly photographed while saying obligatory Muslim prayers, embracing famous preachers, etc.

And since ‘jihad’ in the popular imagination is often perceived to be something aggressive and manly, Khan poses as an outspoken and fearless saviour of not only the people of Pakistan, but also of the ‘ummah’.

Yet, by all accounts, he is not very religious. He’s not secular either. But this is how populists are. They are basically nothing. They are great performers who can draw devotion from a great many people — especially those who are struggling to formulate a political identity for themselves. There are no shortcuts to this. But populists provide them shortcuts.

Khan is a curious mixture of an Islamist and a brawler. But both of these attributes mainly reside on the surface and in his rhetoric. The only aim one can say that is lingering underneath the surface is an inexhaustible ambition to be constantly admired and, of course, rule as a North Korean premier does. Conjuring lots of adulation, but zero opposition.

Yearning for the Miracle Man

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


After rough weather and stormy seas battered the country for three quarters of a century, a nation adrift saw two miracle men arise. Separated by 50 years and endowed with magical personalities, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan set the public imagination on fire by challenging the established order.

After Bhutto was sent to the gallows, many PPP jiyalas self-flagellated, with several immolating themselves in despair. Till their fiery end, they believed in a feudal lord’s promise of socialist utopia. Similar horrific scenes occurred after the assassination of his charismatic daughter. That the father was instrumental in the break-up of Pakistan, and that during the daughter’s years Pakistan fell yet deeper into a pit of corruption, left jiyalas unfazed. Today’s Sindh remains firmly in the grip of a quasi-feudal dynasty and the Bhutto cult.

But still worse might lie ahead as Imran Khan’s cult goes from strength to strength. Writing in Dawn, Adrian Husain worries that a matinee idol with a freshly acquired messianic status is skillfully exploiting widespread anger at corruption to sow hate and division among Pakistanis. Fahd Husain evinces alarm that PTI’s flag-waving ‘youthias’ can see no wrong in whatever Khan says or does. He wonders why even those with Ivy League degrees put their rational faculties into deep sleep. Conversing with PTI supporters, says Ayesha Khan, has become close to impossible.

What enabled these two men to command the senseless devotion of so many millions? Can science explain it? Forget political science. The dark secret is that this isn’t really a science. So, could neuroscience give the answer? Although this area has seen spectacular progress, it is nowhere close to cracking the brain’s inner code.

Instead one must turn to the animal kingdom. Gregariousness and suppression of individuality helps protect members of a species because leaders give direction in a difficult environment. But there is a downside. Herds of sheep are known to follow their leader over a cliff and self-destruct. Human groupies have done similarly.

Specific social attitudes — groupthink and its diametrical opposite, scepticism — explain why some societies crave messiahs while others don’t. At one level, everyone is a sceptic. When it comes to everyday life — where to invest one’s life’s savings, what food to eat, or which doctor to see for a serious health problem — we don’t simply believe all that’s told to us. Instead, we look around for evidence and are willing to let go of ideas when contrary evidence piles up. But in political and religious matters, open-mindedness often turns into absolutism.

Absolutism has made Pakistani politics less and less issue-oriented and more and more tribal. It is hard to tell apart PML-N or PPP from PTI on substantive matters such as the economy, foreign debt, or relations with neighbouring countries. The only certainty is that the government in power will blame the previous government for everything.

This absolutism makes most party supporters purely partisan — you are with us or against us. Zealots willingly believe accusations aimed at the other side but dismiss those aimed at their own. A rational PTI supporter, on the other hand, will entertain the Toshakhana as possible evidence of wrongdoing just as much as Surrey Palace or Avenfield Apartments. He is also willing to admit that all Pakistani political leaders — including Khan — have lifestyles at odds with their declared assets and income. Rational supporters who can say ‘yeh sub chor hain’ exist but are few.

Instead, a culture of intellectual laziness feeds upon wild conspiracy theories coupled with unshakeable belief that political destinies are controlled by some overarching, external power. The ancient Greeks believed that the world was run by the whims and desires of the great god Zeus. For the PTI zealot, the centre of the universe has shifted from Mount Olympus to Washington.

In the zealot’s imagination, an omnipotent American god sits in the White House. With just the flick of his wrist, he ordered Imran Khan’s (former) military sponsors to dump him and then stitched together his fractured political opposition into organising a no-confidence vote. Of course, everyone dutifully obeyed orders. And this supposedly happened inside one of the world’s most anti-American countries! But we know that pigs can fly, don’t we? (Incidentally, America’s severest critic for over 60 years, Noam Chomsky, has reportedly trashed Khan’s claim of a regime change conspiracy.)

Fortunately, not all who stand with a political party, PTI included, are zealots. They do recognise that the country’s entire political class is crass, corrupt, self-seeking, and puts personal interest above that of the electorate. Knowing this they choose a party that, in their estimation, is a lesser evil over a greater one. Democracy depends on this vital principle.

To see this, compare the mass hysteria generated by Khan after being voted out of office with the calmness that followed France’s recent elections. Though despised by the majority of those who voted for him, Macron won handsomely over Marie Le Pen, his far-right, Islamophobic opponent. To her credit, Le Pen did not attribute the defeat either to Washington or to a global Islamic conspiracy. That’s civilised politics.

Why democracy works for France but has had such a rough time in Pakistan is easy to see. It’s not just the military and its constant meddling in political affairs. More important is a culture where emotion and dogma shove truth into the margins. What else explains the enormous popularity of motivational speakers who lecture engineering students on methods to deal with jinns and other supernatural creatures?

Pakistan’s education system stresses faith-unity-discipline at the cost of reason-diversity-liberty. This has seriously impaired the ordinary Pakistani’s capacity to judge. Even in private English-medium schools for the elite, teachers and students remain shackled to a madressah mindset. Why be surprised that so many ‘youthias’ are burger bachas? Unless we allow children to think, the yearning for Miracle Man will continue. It will long outlast Imran Khan — whenever and however he finally exits the scene.

Why Has Imran Plunged Pakistan Into Political Instability?

 

The state of Pakistan: Isn't the support for BJP similar?

Fahd Hussain in The Dawn

Imran Khan’s supporters can see no wrong in what he says or does. We have witnessed this phenomenon unfurl itself like a lazy python these last few years, but more so with greater intensity during Khan’s pre- and post-ouster days. On display is a textbook case of blind devotion. Such devotion entails a deliberate — or perhaps subconscious — suspension of critical thinking. Only mass hysteria can explain absolute rejection of facts and a willing embrace of free-flying rhetoric untethered by verifiable information.

And yet, does this really make sense?

Bounce this explanation off actual people around you — friends, families, acquaintances — and you start to feel uncomfortable with the laziness of the explanation.

On your left, for instance, is the professor with a doctorate in natural sciences from one of the top universities in the world, someone whose entire educational foundation and career is based on the power of empirical evidence and scientific rationalism — and here he is hysterically arguing why the PTI deputy speaker’s violation of the constitution is no big deal. On your right is the top executive of a multinational company with an MBA from an Ivy League school, someone whose training and practice of craft is based on hard data crunched with power of sharp logic — and here he is frothing at the mouth in delirium while yelling that the Joe Biden administration actually conspired with the entire top leadership of the PDM to topple Imran Khan. 

These are rational people, you remind yourself. You have known them for years, and admired them for their academic and professional achievements — perhaps even been motivated by their pursuit of success — and yet you see them experiencing a strange quasi-psychedelic meltdown in full public glare. It just does not add up.

It is not just these metaphorical persons — resembling many real ones in all our lives, as it so happens — but hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis from all walks of life locked inside a massive groupthink spurred by sweeping generalisations dressed up as political narrative. No argument, no logic and no rationale — no, nothing makes sense, and nothing is acceptable or even worth considering if it does not gel perfectly with their preconceived notions.

What we are witnessing is a seminal moment in our political evolution — progressive or regressive is a matter of personal perspective — and this moment is situated bang in the centre of a social and political transformation so impactful that it could define the shape of our society for the years ahead.

In an acutely polarised environment, it is easy to pass judgement on those sitting across the fence. Most of us yield to this temptation. When we do, we help reinforce caricatures that have little resemblance to people around us, and these fail to explain why people believe what they believe.

So why do such a large number of people believe what they believe even when overwhelming evidence points towards the opposite conclusion? In our context, this may be due in part to the visceral politicisation of the national discourse and the deep personal loathing of rivals that the PTI has injected into what should otherwise be a contest of ideas and ideologies. At the heart of this is the revulsion against the system because it has not really delivered what it exists to deliver: improving the lives of citizens through protection of rights and provision of services. It is therefore easy and convenient to blame the system, and in turn all those institutions that constitute the system as a whole.

Imran Khan has modelled himself well as the anti-system crusader. He insists very persuasively that he has neither been co-opted nor corrupted by the system; that when he says he wants to change this system, it implies that there is nothing sacrosanct about the system, or for that matter, about the exalted institutions that make up the system. He has been able to establish this narrative successfully because the central theme of his narrative is, in fact, true: the system has not delivered.

But the argument is only half done here. The other half is perhaps even more crucial — diagnosing why it has not delivered. It is here that Imran Khan goes off tangent. And he does so not just in terms of his solutions, but his own shockingly weak performance as the prime minister who had it all but could not do much with it. In fact, after nearly four years in power, and having precious little to show for them, Imran has for all practical purposes joined the long line of those who are, in fact, responsible for the sad reality that the system has not delivered.

But someone forgot to break this news to the PTI supporters.

In essence then, if Pakistani society wants to row itself back from this stage where the electorate is at war with itself on a battlefield littered with semi-truths, partial facts and outright lies, it will need to face up to a bitter fact: what we see unfolding in front of us is the contamination of decades of social and educational decay injected with deadly and potent steroids of propaganda, brainwashing and ‘otherisation’ of anyone who looks, speaks, acts or believes differently.

Those social studies books you read in school and thought you would outgrow — well, now you know how wrong you were?

In this cesspool, everyone points fingers at everyone else when no one really has the right to do so. Seven decades of wrong governance laced with wrong priorities and fuelled by wrong policies have led us to a stage today where traditional parties cannot stomach the aspirations of a new generation, and new parties cannot digest the requirements of what constitutes governance, statecraft and institutional equilibrium within a democratic society.

And you thought holding elections was our biggest problem today. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Perils Of Conceptual Reality

Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times

I’m sure by now you must have come across people (mostly on social media) who let loose a barrage of words as a reaction to what they believe is an anti-Imran-Khan tweet or post. The words are almost always,”looters,” “corrupt,” “chor,” and “traitors.” These words are dedicated to parties and leaders who till recently were in the opposition and are now in government (after ousting Khan).

Very rarely can one find a pro-Khan or pro-PTI person actually listing the successes of the ousted PM’s economic or social policies. But the fact is: as much as such folk are rare, so are the previous government’s successes. If one still believes that this is not the case, he or she needs to provide some intelligent, informed arguments so that an exchange can turn into a debate — instead of a hyper-monologue in which a single person is frantically crackling like a broken record: “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Is this person stupid? Not quite. Because one even saw some apparently intelligent men and women crackling in the same manner when Khan fell. To most critics of populism, people who voted for men such as India’s Narendra Modi, America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Pakistan’s Imran Khan, were all largely ‘stupid.’

But what is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked: how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression?

Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, “On Stupidity.” Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. It is a condition in which people become mere tools in the hands of those in power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords. “Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!” ‘Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!’ Repeat.

But Khan did not rise. He fell. Truth is: this condition in which a person becomes a walking-talking instrument of repetitive slogans and catchwords, first appeared during Khan’s rise to power. During that period “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors” were active words, deployed to justify Khan’s rise, and the demise of his opponents. After his fall, the same words have become reactive. Either way, neither then nor now is this condition suitable for a more informed debate between two (or more) opposing ideas or narratives.

Does this mean that most Khan fans are incapable of having such a debate? Many may not be very well-informed about the ins and outs of politics or history, but does that make them stupid — even though sometimes they certainly sound it?

To Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by an assertive external power. In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob wrote that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. Intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’

Golob gave the example of the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the famous fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, a private detective, was an ideal product of the ‘Age of Reason,’ imagined by Doyle as a man who shunned emotions and dealt only in reason, empiricism and the scientific method. Yet, later on in life, Doyle became the antithesis of his character, Holmes. He got into a silly argument with the celebrated illusionist Harry Houdini when the latter rubbished Doyle’s belief that one could communicate with spirits (in a seance).

How could a man who had created a rather convincing empiricist and rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, he would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.

Golob wrote that stupidity can thus be found in supposedly very intelligent people as well. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. But why would one do that?

There can be various reasons for this. According to Golob, Doyle, who had already developed some interest in ‘spirituality,’ began dabbling in the supernatural after the death of his son. According to Golob, “Doyle used his intellect to weave a path through grief that, although obviously irrational, was personally restorative.” So, it can be a way to live through grief or a personal tragedy which things like reason, rationality or logic cannot address. But this does not mean that the thousands of intelligent people who begin to mouth irrational populist hogwash all suffer personal tragedies. Yet, in the context of politics, resentfulness and grief can be triggered in a class or tribe if it is convinced that it has been neglected, mocked or sidelined by a ‘political elite.’

The manifestation of conceptual reality

In the US, folk in the ‘rural’ South felt exactly that. They felt their ideas and lifestyles were mocked by the ‘liberal elite’ for being backward, anti-modern and superstitious. Their resentment in this regard was brilliantly tapped by Donald Trump. And even though the Southern states in the US have the largest number of Christian fundamentalists and regular Church-goers in that country, they continued to support Trump despite his involvement in scandals both of the flesh and finances.

This brings us back to Nazi Germany and Bonhoeffer. A nation was left grief-stricken by a humiliating defeat (during the First World War). It was thus willing to suspend all critical thinking after the grief was first treated with a barrage of conspiracy theories (blaming the Jews), and then by a man who became a powerful conduit of these theories. His rise was the sum of collective resentment and grief. It was a negation of empirical reality where a society was trapped in a serious existential crisis.

Theoretically, the crisis could have been addressed in a rational manner as well (such as through the continuation of the democratic process). But such processes evolve slowly and come to be seen as part of a reality that is pregnant with crisis. The answers to such a malaise often come in the shape of ‘conceptual reality.’ Empirical realty is the reality which one interacts with on a daily basis through the senses. Conceptual realty, on the other hand, is created and fuelled by certain ideological drivers or by what one thinks empirical reality should actually be. Conceptual reality is an imagined world but is stuffed with claims and physical paraphernalia to make it seem like empirical reality.

The promise of a ‘thousand-year-Reich’ by the Nazis was a fantasy that used physical symbols (such as a messiah-like leader, large rallies and public marches, uniforms, imposing architecture, etc.) to replace an empirical reality with a conceptual one. And when a person escapes into a conceptual reality, communicating with him or her on an empirical and rational level becomes next to impossible.1983 copy of US government instructions to its embassies in Muslim countries on how to ‘politely’ deny that astronaut Neil Armstrong had converted to Islam

Conceptual reality is a product of – and mostly appeals to – people who have developed a persecution complex because they failed to find an identity or purpose in the empirical reality. So, they dismiss it and look to replace the ‘what is’ with the ‘what (they believe) should be’. This is fine if they can do so while remaining within the empirical reality. But the results can be disastrous when they reject empirical reality by losing themselves in building a conceptual reality. This reality is utopian. But when manifested physically, it quickly becomes dystopian, myopic and even delusional.

German historian Markus Daechsel has brilliantly demonstrated this in his book The Politics of Self Expression. Conceptual reality includes the projection of one’s religious and ideological beliefs on people that have little or nothing to do with them. Conceptual reality also entails projections that are often proliferated through populist media as a way to concretise conceptual reality.

Daechsel gave the example of certain pre-Partition Muslim and Hindu outfits who insisted that their members wear a uniform and hold parades. Daechsel writes that in the empirical reality, there was no war or revolution taking place there. But in the minds of the members of the outfits, there was such a situation (or there should have been). So, they created a conceptual reality in which there was revolutionary turmoil and these outfits were an integral part of it.

Daechsel also gave the example in which Hindus and Muslims, after feeling unable to challenge Western inventions and economics in the empirical reality, created a conceptual reality by claiming that whatever the West had achieved in the fields of science had already been achieved by ancient Hindus and/or is already present in Islamic texts.

In the late 1970s, tabloids in Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt carried a front-page news about Neil Armstrong — the famous American astronaut who, in 1969, became the first man to walk on the moon. The news claimed that Armstrong had converted to Islam. Supposedly he had done so after confessing that when he was on the moon, he had heard the sound of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer.Conceptual reality can be a very emotional place

J.R. Hensen, in his 2006 biography of Armstrong, First Man, writes that by 1980 the news had been repeatedly carried and reproduced by tabloids in a number of Muslim-majority countries. So much so, that Armstrong began receiving invitations from Islamic organisations. The news continued to gather momentum in Muslim countries. Hensen writes that in 1983, on Armstrong’s request, the US State Department issued instructions to US embassies in Muslim countries asking them to “politely but firmly” communicate that Armstrong had not converted to Islam and that “he had no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic activities.”

Despite this, the belief that he had converted to Islam after hearing the azaan on the moon continued to do the rounds. In fact, this impression still pops up on YouTube channels and websites funded and run by various Islamic evangelical organisations. This is a case of how a conceptual reality (in this case, the power of ‘Eastern spirituality’) compelled a member of empirical reality (Western science and technology) to leave the latter and embrace the former.

In December 2018, former PM Imran Khan gleefully shared a 1988 video recording on Twitter of conservative Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmad. In it, Ahmad is seen claiming that according to one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s doctors, the founder of Pakistan, during his last moments, spoke about the importance of imposing Shariah laws and the caliphate system in Pakistan.

This was conceptual reality coming into play to counter the reality in which Jinnah had done no such thing and was, in fact, a Westernised and pluralistic politician. This nature of projection of a conceptual reality actually goes further back.

The day after the founder of the modern Turkish republic Kemal Ataturk passed away in November 1939, one of the leading Urdu dailies in pre-Partition India, the Inqilab, reported that Ataturk, who had slipped into a coma before his death, “briefly woke up to convey a message to a servant of his.” Apparently, the staunch, life-long secularist who went the whole nine yards during his long rule to erase all cultural and political expressions associated with Turkey’s caliphate past, had briefly woken up from a coma to instruct his servant to tell the “millat-i-Islamiyya” to follow on the footsteps of the Khulafa-i-Rashideen.

Inqilab was a well-respected Urdu daily catering to the urban Muslim middle classes in pre-Partition India. In its 11 November 1939 issue, the paper went on to ‘report’ that Ataturk, after communicating his message to the servant, shouted “Allah is great!” and passed away – this time, forever. Quite clearly, unable to come to terms with the dispositions of Ataturk and Jinnah in the empirical reality, some created a conceptual reality where, in death, both dramatically became caliphate enthusiasts.

Let us now take a more contemporary example: the so-called ‘US conspiracy’ that ousted Imran Khan as PM. This is being repeated over and over again by Khan, his supporters and some half-a-dozen TV anchors. In empirical reality, the performance of Khan’s regime compelled its erstwhile pillar of support, the powerful military establishment, to begin distancing itself from a malfunctioning government. This created space for opposition parties to conjure enough strength in the Parliament to remove him through a no-confidence vote.

However, in the conceptual reality — that began being constructed by Khan when his ouster became a stark possibility — US and European powers conspired with opposition parties and pressurised the military to oust Khan because he wanted a sovereign foreign policy and was planning to construct an anti-West bloc in the region. There is no empirical evidence that substantiates the existence of a foreign conspiracy. But then, there is no place for anything empirical in a realm that is entirely conceptual.

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Pakistan's Brave Judge

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Justice Athar Minallah, Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court, has made history. He has ordered the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to knock down the Pakistan Navy’s Sailing Club House on the edge of the Rawal Dam in Rawalpindi as well as the Monal Restaurant in Islamabad and seize the Margalla Greens Golf Club in the Capital, because these have been built illegally on land belonging to the Margalla Hills National Park. He has thus outlawed the military’s claim to about 8000 acres of such land. Most significantly, the good judge has expressed the view that the Pakistan Navy does not have the authority to undertake a real estate development venture, nor the right to lend its name to any such enterprise.

Naturally, this judgment has warmed the cockles of millions of Pakistani hearts even as it has raised the hackles of powerful people lording it over unaccountable state institutions which have similar illegal stakes in real estate across the country. For starters, the Auditor General of Pakistan has revealed a list of 79 “encroachments” on the land of the Margalla Hills National Park, noting that several government bodies – CDA, Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad, Islamabad Wildlife Management Board, etc. – claim the right to control and manage the area, making the job of adjudication of rights and permissions difficult.

Justice Minallah’s judgment has also ignited questions of how courts have earlier dealt with such matters relating to the rich and powerful as opposed to the poor or feeble. In recent times, two cases have roused public indignation and in both the courts have been inclined to bend over backwards to appease powerful stakeholders. The first is that of Imran Khan’s sprawling multi-billion rupee estate in Bani Gala which was illegally constructed many years ago and brazenly “regularized” by the CDA on orders of Justice Saqib Nisar. In pursuit of this court order, the wretched chairman of the CDA who sent a questionnaire to Imran Khan regarding the property was swiftly dispatched to the nether lands and the journalist who quoted a news report exposing the PM’s shenanigans was served with a “show cause notice” by PEMRA. The second is a high rise luxury apartment construction at 1 Constitution Avenue Islamabad, a list of whose owners reads like a Who’s Who of the high and mighty (Imran Khan was one such). This building again, was “regularized” by the Saqib Nisar court, in sharp contrast to the demolition orders of lesser structures and lay encroachments in Karachi ordered recently by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Gulzar Ahmed.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The highway robbery began at the time of partition in 1947 when tens of billions worth urban and rural evacuee property of Hindus and Sikhs was seized by the new lords of the state and distributed freely over the years to their favoured assets and allies regardless of merit or due process. In time, the parliaments of the state began to make laws for cheap acquisition of lands and properties belonging to Pakistanis for the avowed purpose of building public parks, educational institutions or military security and defense installations. These land were then leased out at throwaway rates to favoured institutions and individuals, only for the latter to quietly transform these into high value, exorbitantly profitable commercial ventures in the private sector (housing societies, clubs, marriage halls, golf courses, etc). And that is how “Military Inc.” irresistibly came to be the leading “businessman” in Pakistan, owning airlines, shipping, hotels, banks, insurance, food, fertiliser, cement, housing, you name it. This is why Justice Minallah’s recent judgment is something to write home about. Earlier, he had put a stop to the practice of the civil bureaucracy allotting valuable residential and commercial plots to themselves and judges at throwaway prices to ensure protection against land-grabbing claims and law-bending practices, thus casting the first few stones at the established disorder. Which other court or judge will follow his laudable example and make these singular milestones in Pakistani history?

The Supreme Court is now faced with another public interest challenge. The Supreme Court Bar Association led by lawyer Ahsan Bhoon has filed a petition challenging the lifetime disqualification of PMLN’s Nawaz Sharif and PTI’s Jehangir Tareen from holding public office for not being “sadiq and ameen”. This petition follows revelations of high level judicial impropriety, misconduct and political bias by ex-CJP Saqib Nisar (that name again!) made by ex-CJ Gilgit-Baltistan, Rana Shamim, aimed at knocking out Nawaz Sharif from politics. To prepare the ground further for appropriate judicial review, the ex-Secretary of the PTI, Ahmed Jawad, has now come out of the closet to level accusations of judicial and military manipulation to oust Nawaz Sharif from office and hoist Imran into it. His allegation that Supreme Court judges disqualified Jehangir Tareen in order to “balance” their unfair ouster of Nawaz Sharif is bound to impact the trial and appeals of Mr Sharif in multiple cases and help pave the way for the judiciary to reclaim its lost credibility. It is significant that Justice Athar Minallah is also seized of adjudicating the allegations of ex-CJ GB Rana Shamim, and he will now be hard pressed to include the testimony of Ahmed Jawad in his deliberations.

Is Justice Athar Minallah the man of the moment? The history man?