Pakistan is financially, politically, and philosophically bankrupt. What it needs is a new paradigm: a truly people powered government by Arsalan Malik in The Friday Times
In recent months, I have had several conversations with my fellow diaspora Pakistanis in the US about the dumpster fire that is Pakistani politics and economy. To my incredulous amazement, many of them still support the artist formerly known as the “Kaptaan.” Imran Khan continues to have a firm hold on the imagination of these diaspora Pakistanis.
To wit, a very successful, and intelligent Pakistani finance professional told me “IK is the only person who will stand up to the military and save Pakistan from default.” Never mind that IK was a construct of the military in the first place (indeed the overwhelming majority of Pakistani politicians are) and was unable to bring it to heel when he tried during his first unsuccessful term as PM. Pakistanis who think this way although passionate and well meaning, seem to be in-denial of the fact that a large part of the reason we are facing default is because of the fuel subsidies Khan revived a few days before his ouster. Those subsidies further depleted the Treasury at a critical time and effectively tore up the IMF agreement. It made no economic sense and was an act of pure pique to sabotage the subsequent government and curry favor with the masses. This was not the act of a leader who puts his country’s interests before his own. The successive government had to reverse this but the damage was already done. This is the same sort of irrationally misplaced good will that afflicts Trump supporters, who still think he will “drain the swamp” when, in actuality he moved the swamp to DC with him after his election. Just like Trump supporters are convinced he is the answer, many Pakistanis still think that IK will somehow save the Pakistani economy. This is a defensive retreat into fantasy in the face of the unpalatable reality that IK is perhaps even more narcissistic and incompetent than the other inept and feckless fools who have tried and failed to run Pakistan.
Another group of less sophisticated expats think that IK will be successful because “he is not corrupt and is not looking to enrich himself” as opposed to the shamelessly kleptocratic Bhutto/Zardari and Sharif clans. True, IK may not be corrupt but a person is known by the company he keeps. In IK’s case, this consists of the same corrupt, bandwagon careerists in bed with the military who have been a blight on Pakistan’s iniquitous politics ever since its inception. They continued to loot the country in cahoots with the military, under his watch and then abandoned him as soon as the going got tough and he ended up on the wrong side of the military establishment.
However, what both of these Pakistani expat types get right is that if elections were held tomorrow, IK would sweep to victory. He is doubtlessly the most popular politician in the country and has activated and vitalized countless numbers of young people who would not have been otherwise interested in politics. At the same time, he has unwittingly exposed the real puppet masters of Pakistan – its insatiable and pretorian military – and focused the ire of the masses against the top men in khaki behind the curtain for the first time in Pakistan’s history.
IK’s supporters have legitimate grievances against the failed ruling class and establishment elite, and see Imran as their last best hope. This is similar to the effect that Bernie Sanders has had on American millennials and Gen Z. The difference is that Bernie Sanders actually has a progressive, pro-worker, truly populist policy agenda. IK is an inept, incompetent, socially conservative, right-wing populist figure. He is a cult leader, whose track record proves that he cares for his ego much more than he cares for the country. We can be sure that, if accepted back in the fold by the military establishment, instead of confronting it, he will turn out to be even more compliant, because like all narcissists he cares more about power and assuring his own ascendancy and legacy.
Also, unlike Bernie, his politics excludes a class analysis of the problems that afflict Pakistan. Pakistan is at a crossroads. Instead of looking for solutions in another authoritarian strong man and the same old neoliberal policies, the answer to Pakistan’s travails lies in returning power to the working class people of the country, through, for example, the local grassroots organization of truly leftist and socialist political parties like the Mazdoor-Kisaan Party, the Awami Khalq Party, and the Awami Worker’s Party. No one who belongs to the elite that IK belongs to, which includes myself and my friend in finance by the way, can be expected to fix Pakistan.
Pakistan is financially, politically, and philosophically bankrupt. What it needs is a new paradigm: a truly people powered government, led by leaders from the working class, a la Lula in Brazil, that will have the mandate of a super majority of the people to enact progressive policies like raising the taxes on real estate speculation which is the most secure and profitable form of investment for Pakistan’s elites. Such a movement will also institute much needed land reforms to break up antediluvian and anachronistic agricultural monopolies. It will invest in the health and education of the working people of Pakistan instead of F-16s and it will confront the neoliberal institutions that have a stranglehold on Pakistan’s economy by, for example, reversing the disastrous terms of business with the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) which are the central reason for recurring power shortages resulting in an untold number of work days lost, and loss of profitability of private enterprises, and has plunged Pakistan into darkness and creeping de-industrialization.
True change only takes place when millions of working people demand it and when they demand justice. Then, the people at the top have no choice but to respond. In the end, the only force that will save Pakistan are the people of Pakistan, not the military, not the elite, not the businessmen, not the neoliberal economists or a cult of personality but the working-class people of the country. Otherwise, like all Potemkin villages, it will fall apart.
Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn
Recently, Orya Maqbool Jan, the retired bureaucrat who now fancies himself as an ideologue and political commentator, warned that if the ‘establishment’ continues to support the current government, Pakistan will be rocked by a revolutionary uprising like the one that erupted in Iran in 1979.
Then there is the former prime minister Imran Khan who was ousted in April 2022 and is now claiming that, if he is arrested, people would pour out on the roads like thousands of Turks did during a failed coup attempt against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.
Pakistani politicians and ideologues often refer to contemporary dramatic events elsewhere to conjure alarmist possibilities in their own country. Only rarely do they refer to past events that took place in Pakistan. At least not in this context.
For example, no one speaks of the violent 1983 movement against the dictator Ziaul Haq, which almost yanked Sindh away from the rest of the country. Or very few now speak of the mass uprising against the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1968.
Surely, our latest batch of sudden revolutionaries such as Jan and Khan could have given examples closer to home to forewarn the coming of an apocalypse in case things didn’t go the way they want them to.
Maybe they believe that examples like the 1968 and the 1983 movements, or even the 1977 uprising against the ZA Bhutto regime, or for that matter, the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement against the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship, were not dramatic enough? Perhaps. Indeed, images of public executions and firing squads and burning buildings from the Iranian Revolution, and visuals of people lying in front of tanks in Turkey, are certainly more exciting.
In 1969, when protests, mainly by leftist youth, had managed to force Ayub Khan to resign, the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi warned that the youth may face brutal retaliations from those who did not agree with their ideology. Maududi referenced the violence that Indonesian communists encountered in 1965-66.
In 1965, 500,000 to 1,000,000 communists and alleged communist sympathisers were massacred by the Indonesian armed forces and by right-wing Islamist groups when the military accused the largest communist party in Indonesia of murdering six military officers and attempting a coup.
But whereas Maududi, perturbed by the increasing leftist sentiments among Pakistan’s youth, warned about a retaliation against them in the mould of the 1965 Indonesian massacres, the retaliation did take place two years later — but 2,000 km away in the erstwhile East Pakistan.
What’s more, Maududi’s political party sent volunteers to facilitate Pakistan’s armed forces to eliminate Bengali nationalists.
This begs the question whether the alarmism that references dramatic upheavals elsewhere is actually wishful thinking on the part of those who use it to conjure what might happen in Pakistan? Their ‘warnings’ might actually be desires or even fantasies. After all, wouldn’t men such as Khan love seeing his supporters lying in front of tanks, or Jan relish the idea of an Iran-type revolution in Pakistan?
The reason that these remain alarmist fantasies inspired by events outside Pakistan is because Pakistan’s diverse ethnic and sectarian demography and the strongly unified nature of its armed forces are not compatible with the aforementioned events in Iran and Turkey — two countries that enjoy more sectarian/religious and ethnic homogeneity.
Yet, the reference of the 1979 Iranian uprising was all the rage in Pakistan across the 1980s. Ironically, it was mostly referred to by those in power. For example, in 1980, a sitting minister in the Zia dictatorship explained Zia’s Hudood Ordinances as deterrents formulated “to avoid an Iran-like revolution in Pakistan.” The stringent ordinances were described as ‘Islamic’ by the dictatorship, but were largely seen as being draconian and even “barbaric” by Zia’s opponents.
The minister was thus warning that, without such ordinances, the “Islam-loving people of Pakistan” would rise up and demand Shariah rule and that Zia was fulfilling this demand in a more measured manner and therefore mitigating the kind of commotion seen in Iran in 1979.
Even till the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990-93), Sharif was warning that if he did not continue “Zia’s mission”, the country would face an Iran-like uprising. In this case, however, it wasn’t wishful thinking, really. It was a warning to those who were his opponents.
In a way, Nawaz was telling them (as had Zia) to better tolerate his strand of Islamism than the strands being demanded by militant clerics. But why refer to the 1979 Iranian revolution in this respect, when one could refer to the vicious 1953 and 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya movements? Of course, after 1974, these movements became constitutionally justified and couldn’t be used as warnings of any kind.
The devastating Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) was once another favourite alarmist example. In the late 1980s, when ethnic violence erupted in Karachi, the then chief of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), Altaf Hussain, often warned that Karachi would become like Beirut, the Lebanese city that was ravaged by the civil war. Images of that civil war were still fresh in people’s minds. So, instead of, say, referring to war-torn Dhaka of 1971 in former East Pakistan, Hussain chose to speak of Beirut.
The interesting bit is that, whether it was 1965’s Indonesia, 1980’s Beirut, 1979’s Iran or 2016’s Turkey, none of these references are very convincing in Pakistan’s context because the dynamics of Pakistan’s political and economic cleavages are nothing like those of Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon or Turkey.
And certainly not like those of 18th century France. Yes, Pakistani politicians are also very fond of warning about an uprising like the 18th century French Revolution. Why not refer to the 1857 uprising against the British in India instead, one wonders?
Most of these referential warnings look and sound like alarmist fantasies more than an outcome of any informed analysis. Pakistan’s 75 years are full of events that our alarmists can conjure. Yet, they continue to look elsewhere, blissfully ignorant of the fact that conditions elsewhere are quite different than what they are in Pakistan.
The reading of history by our alarmists is alarmingly sensationalist.
Asad Ejaz Butt in The Dawn
When Pakistan’s dollar reserves fell below $5 billion in December, and its credit default risk had reportedly become too high for analysts to ignore the possibility of an imminent default, the central bank made a policy decision to allow the opening of import letter of credits (LC) in a staggered manner to ensure spreading of the dollar reserve over a longer period of importing time.
The idea was to allow the government some diplomatic time to knock on the doors of friendly countries and multilateral organisations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Fund had dilly-dallied on the ninth review to force monetary authorities in Pakistan to take the first steps towards a few baseline reforms, including the relegation of the dollar to the markets. Markets that the central bank and the government regards as ripe with imperfections.
The rupee was finally devalued last week which automatically implied that it was left to a market that had the propensity to sell it to gain dollars. This provided IMF with the confidence to schedule the ninth review, which is now ongoing in Islamabad. It is likely that the IMF’s review will be completed, and default, as was predicted by some and wished by a few others, didn’t happen.
However, while the media thundered about the staggeringly high levels of inflation and alarmingly low levels of reserves, and analysts evaluated an infinitely large number of scenarios that would lead to a default, no one from the economists ever explained what a default meant and what would have happened to the economy if it took place.
From the mid of November to the end of January, I was asked this question many times: “is Pakistan going to default, or has it already defaulted?” None of those asking the question seemed to know what it meant for a country to default and what would happen if it did. Last week, for the first time, someone asked me what Pakistan’s economy would have looked like under the influence of default.
Put in very simple terms, a default for a country like Pakistan with large exposure in commercial loans means defaulting against commercial debt. Bilateral debt can be rolled over, while debt from multilateral organisations often has long-term maturity cycles making a country’s default vulnerability depend primarily on commercial loans.
So, imagine if Pakistan’s reserves had declined to such low levels that it would have defaulted against its commercial debt. This would have led the central bank to refuse commercial lenders’ payments to repay or service their debt.
That would have reflected in the further downgrading of the country’s ratings by agencies like Moody’s and S&P, dampening the trust of other international lenders and, after that, the government’s ability to raise new commercial debt.
Since the dollar inflows would have declined due to limitations of debt inflows, you could have only imported as much as you exported plus the dollars that expat Pakistanis remit from all over the world. This would be like a situation where you are forced by circumstances to keep your current account deficit close to zero.
Many of the imports that you would not afford would be inputs to the industry. While that would impact exports, the slowdown would impact production in the non-exporting sectors, pulling down the overall level of production in the economy. The natural consequence of all of this is the classic saga of too much Pakistani rupee chasing too few goods.
Inflation would have skyrocketed as the local currency that people would be holding would not translate into consumable items. Contraction in the economy due to production losses would have seen many people get laid off in a span of weeks, leaving some with money but nothing to buy and many without even money to buy. Economists call such situations characterised by slow growth but high unemployment and inflation ‘stagflation’.
This was played out in Sri Lanka in the summer of 2022. It suspended repayments on about $7bn of international loans due out of a total foreign debt pile of $51bn while it had $25m in usable foreign reserves.
Pakistan has around $3bn in reserves against an external debt pile of $126bn. Pakistan, in December 2022, was definitely headed in the Sri Lankan direction. However, we did not default and any chance of doing so has been left far behind.
Reviving even mere inches away from default is a world different to an actual default since, in the former case, you can resume business as usual as soon as a multilateral like the IMF returns with a few dollars in hand. However, in the latter case, even multilateral balance of payments support will take years to rebuild the economic edifice.
Pakistan didn’t default, and those who thought what happened to Pakistan in December of 2022 was a default must realise that a real default would have been much scarier than a few hundred LCs being opened with delay.
This piece is based on several conversations held with Mubashir Iqbal and Haider Ali.
Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn
In September, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was admonished by the Guidance Patrol for ‘improperly’ wearing her hijab. She was then allegedly beaten to death. Her death triggered an unprecedented protest movement, in which women as well as men are attacking symbols of Iran’s theocracy like never before.
The protests have evolved into an open rebellion against Iran’s morality laws and against groups that the state has employed to implement these laws.
The Guidance Patrol is the successor of the Islamic Revolution Committees that were formed in 1979 to forcibly implement ‘Islamic morality’ in public spaces — especially when wearing the hijab was made compulsory in 1983. Over the years, there have been isolated protests against this law, but nothing like what Iran is witnessing today.
The protests are challenging the whole idea of ‘moral policing’ that began to be adopted by the state in many Muslim-majority countries from 1979 onwards. After Iran, moral policing units also emerged in Saudi Arabia and, from the 1990s, in Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and, in certain regions of Malaysia and Indonesia.
The state gives the units powers to check and correct ‘moral digressions’, such as ‘inappropriate’ dressing (especially by women), ‘unseemly’ interaction between men and women in public, or the exhibition of any other ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour. Moral policing outfits have often been accused of using violent methods, mostly against women.
However, as morality policing organisations are now being openly challenged in Iran, recently they were disbanded in Saudi Arabia by the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Their presence contradicts his reformist agenda. Also, the criticism against the tactics used by the police was intensifying. Morality policing units were also dismantled in Sudan in 2019, after the overthrow of the dictator Omar al-Bashir.
According to Amanda F. Detrick (University of Washington, 2017): “States with religious systems of government, employ morality police as a formal method of social control to expand and stabilise their rule. Morality police units enable the regime to project power into society and retain dominance by affirming religious legitimacy, suppressing dissent and enforcing socio-religious and political uniformity.”
Moral policing can also emerge as an informal method of social control. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the “governance of the self” can lead to the “governance of others.” In other words, sometimes, when an individual or a group embraces an idea of morality, they may end up enforcing this idea on others. If the enforcement finds traction among a large body of people in a society, the state is likely to adopt it as policy.
For example, even though most Muslim-majority countries do not have moral policing outfits formed by the state, ever since the 1980s, vigilante groups have been known to implement ‘morality’ by force. Such enforcements have often been turned into law by governments.
In Pakistan, for years, non-state groups campaigned to oust the Ahmadiyya from the fold of Islam. At first, the state treated the campaigns as subversive. But when the campaigns began to find greater traction among the polity, especially in the Punjab, the government declared the Ahmadiyya as a non-Muslim minority.
Informal methods of social control that emerge from below have been highly successful in Pakistan. From the late 1960s, there were campaigns against nightclubs, cinemas and the sale of alcoholic beverages by right-wing vigilante groups. They were suppressed by the government. But in the late 1970s, when a government was struggling to stall a political movement against it, it suddenly agreed to close down clubs and ban alcohol. But this was a futile attempt to regain social control.
Consequently, in 1980, there were plans by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship to form state-backed moral policing units. They were to enforce gender segregation in public spaces, ‘proper’ dressing habits (especially among women), compulsory prayers in the mosques, etc. Women’s organisations saw these as a way to strengthen a myopic patriarchal ethos. Their activism deterred the dictatorship from forming moral policing squads.
However, the frequency of vigilante groups enforcing (their ideas of) morality increased. For example, a group calling itself the ‘Allah Tigers’ started to raid hotels and even homes on every New Years Eve. Technically, their actions were unlawful, but the dictatorship tolerated them and saw them as the actions of ‘common people’ who were willingly implementing the state’s ‘Islamisation’ project.
There have also been non-state groups enforcing the hijab and discouraging the celebration of events such as Valentine’s Day. Although the government and the state have not appropriated these as policy, many educational institutions have.
But formal and informal methods of social control through moral policing are not only restricted to Muslim-majority countries. Ironically, outside the myths of ancient ‘pious’ states, one of the first formal examples in this respect appeared in 19th century England.
The regular police force in 19th century England was encouraged to ‘morally regulate’ the society. To 19th century British ‘gentry’, morality was deemed a necessary part of life, in order to hold and keep social stability. The police often took action (sometimes preemptive) against alleged prostitutes, drunkenness, betting and ‘habitual’ criminals.
Nevertheless, moral policing in most Muslim and, particularly in non-Muslim regions, has largely remained informal. But it has been rather successful in influencing state institutions. For example, years of anti-abortion activism in the US finally led to an abortion ban imposed by the US Supreme Court.
Also, in many countries, non-state moral policing of content on social media and the electronic media has pushed governments to pull down websites, films and TV shows. Interestingly, informal moral policing in a non-Muslim country has been most rampant in India. Vigilante groups often emerge to enforce ‘Hindu values’. These can include action against those celebrating Valentine’s Day, to lynching those who are accused of eating beef.
Moral policing is a serious issue. Morality has mostly to do with factors rooted in religion. There may be a consensus on the more general aspects of a faith, but there are always many interpretations of various topical aspects of it. One cannot impose morality based on a single interpretation.
Instead, states need to educate citizens to embrace pluralism and tolerance and exhibit behaviour that does not create social disruption and divisions. An individual’s choices that form their moral self-governance should be respected, as long as they are not raging to turn it into the governance of others.
