by Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Is Pakistan’s sovereignty threatened by external powers? Or is any such apprehension merely paranoia, megalomania, or a self-serving ploy of our own politicians?

In the case of the PTI, the external-plotting threat to national sovereignty proposition evolved with the then PM Imran Khan’s waving of a diplomatic cipher in the air on nationwide TV; and not quite saying that the then army chief was the gentleman he had in mind when referring to contemporary equivalents of Mir Sadiq, whose desertion of Tipu Sultan and sympathy for the East India Company (rather than for the unmentioned other foreign adventurers who aided Tipu Sultan) culminated in British Raj. Imran Khan had earlier strengthened public psychological receptivity by repeatedly labelling his political challengers traitors to the country or Ghaddars. The clear as day post-cipher corollary was that he alone among leaders was a patriot, and bulwark to external subjugation and intrusion.

Betraying one’s country is on a different scale altogether from, for instance, marketing state gifts or obliging cronies – who often show their appreciation rather concretely. However, the PTI chairman as PM never tackled his political opponents with any outright formal charge of secession or anti-state activity. This was unlike the once controversial now glibly lauded Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who approved the Hyderabad Tribunal to fix Wali Khan, Bizenjo and other inconvenient political figures. Several years later, in quite another style and mode, the Jinnahpur slur on the MQM was outlined in a map with a view to allaying misgivings on the severity in containing Mohajir defiance and militancy in the demands for political space in Sindh.

Pakistan – as is natural in a state that was formally demarcated amid much controversy – has always felt itself under threat by the resultant truncated non-Akhand Bharat’s resentment of its emergence; as well as by ethno-national emulsification along its borders with Iran and Afghanistan. Since its formation Pakistan has been groping for political structuring with sundry Constitutions – usually found wanting – new ones in 1956; 1962; 1973–: much amended but still in place.

Political repression, inequities, and injustices – despite the lesson of 1971—continue to exacerbate nationalist separatism.  Administrative methods vacillate between unitary emphases and decentralization. Bonapartists, searching for their very own civil political space, have experimented with different routes to local government: a formal tier provincial and federal bigwigs have less need of. Even today, within the national electoral and legislative frame, political pundits and leaders inconsistently and variously tout proportional representation, strongly focused individualized presidential controls, or representatively diffused parliamentary ones.  The judiciary, long accustomed to passing political judgment, is developing an appetite for preordaining it. It presently rivals the military in ploughing and treading political turf.

Dis-satisfied with their political state and internal management, Pakistanis live in the surround of a globalized multilateral world in which they perceive superpower one-upmanship as having stripped the west’s developed democracies of the moral authority they once enjoyed. ‘Defensive’ apprehensions as to possible use of weapons of mass destruction by lesser others, and a self-conferred moral obligation to underwrite democracy (first and foremost in strategically worthwhile countries) through selective support or pre-emptive interventionism are cynically regarded in the countries being helped or constrained and their neighbours.  Thus Asad bad; but Mursi good; Occupied Kashmir allowable like Israel’s nibbles at the West Bank, but a militant Palestinian response less so.  Afghanistan, especially significant for neighbouring Pakistan, has at times been seen by NATO through the prism of Charlie Wilson’s war against Marxist godlessness sometimes as a state to be obliterated in a war on Islamic terror. Pakistan’s orientations had relevance in either case.

Naturally Pakistanis wonder how the western hemisphere sees their geo-strategically placed nuclear-armed Muslim country and what fragments they may choose to shake to get the Pakistani chips in the regional kaleidoscope to fall into place “their” way – which “they” can assert is really the only right one for de facto and sometimes also de jure; might becomes right.

Knowingly or unknowingly, PDM political leadership following Imran Khan has made foreign policy an electoral determinant; but no party’s manifesto is manifest. Good relations with all has no substance when some among the “all” are in explicit disagreement, and may ask for definitions from a largely underwritten financially but obstinately sovereign state.

Before we can answer questions for others we need to frame them to and for ourselves: And have them answered.  And if we have sovereign democratic survival in mind our politicians need to agree to disagree if they cannot reach a consensus and let the ballot-box speak: and listen to it without ensuring or demanding it only speak their own speak.