Events over the past week have brought into focus three different templates of how civil-military relations have developed in our wider neighbourhood. The Turkey elections are about the future of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The answer will depend on a subsequent round of voting later this month. That the Turkish military is neither a player nor an issue in this contest has been Erdogan’s contribution. The impress of the military on Turkey’s polity in the second half of the 20th century contrasts with its gradual erosion in this century. Erdogan is credited with cutting down a powerful military, secularist in its outlook, and transforming it into a political non-issue. In this, he used all possible means — fair and foul — and also rode on a crest of religious and nationalist assertion. Whether he meets his nemesis in this election or not, one aspect of his tangled legacy is clear: the complete transformation of Turkey’s civil-military dynamics over the past two decades.
To our east, another election — this one in Thailand — has seen a political front for the Thai military losing substantial ground. The popular vote has gone in favour of parties generally opposed to the traditionalist elite-military combine and its dominance over the past decade since the coup against the then prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, the sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was also removed in a coup in 2006. The Shinawatra clan remains prominent in the current election too, through Thaksin’s daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra. The May 14 popular vote will not entirely redefine the balance between democratic parties and the monarchist-military combine since other constitutional props to the power of the military remain. But it could signal the beginning of another phase in the process of forging a new civil-military balance.
The third example is by far the most dramatic and has riveted the most attention. It is best summed up by the question — what on earth is happening in Pakistan? Is Imran Khan only the latest, and the most unlikely, in a long list of protagonists who have taken on the military establishment and sought to establish a new and healthier civil-military equation? Or is there a deeper process at play of which the current contests are only the symptoms? If everyone in Pakistan is asking this question, the answer, to some at least, oscillates between revolution and implosion. The audacity of the torching of the residence of the Lahore corps commander — a property also known as Jinnah House because the founder of Pakistan once owned it — and the haemorrhage in the value of the Pakistani rupee animate both these polarities.
Can it actually be that in a most convoluted manner the events are coalescing around a single metanarrative of civilian forces on a collision course with the military establishment? If this, indeed, is happening, it is not because anyone wanted it: tactical play and the pace of events have led to this moment. Is Pakistan’s long history of civil-military contestation, with its outcomes generally tilted in the army’s direction, now at a new tipping point? Imran Khan is no democrat, but he is a charismatic leader with a near cult-like following and heads a political party, which may well form the next government if an election were to be held anytime soon. He combines in him shades of Erdogan and the Shinawatras, but tops it up with his own brand of narcissism and lack of scruples. Could it be that decades of a slowly maturing anti-military sentiment and the incremental politicisation of society have given the country this trajectory? Can this vector be an instance of history’s hidden plan exhibiting itself?
Yet, beneath this metanarrative of civic protest against the military establishment is a more confused picture of a splintered polity. The division between Imran Khan and the coalition government is only one of the many fault lines in play. The division between the Supreme Court and the government is matched by one within the court between the current chief justice and the next in line. The chief justice appears to most to be openly partisan on the side of Imran Khan even as he presides over a divided house. The president is an Imran Khan acolyte and appointee and, while his term lasts, is the joker or the trump in the cards held by Imran Khan.
To some, these divisions and conflicts are subordinate to a more fundamental chasm, and this is between the army chief and Imran Khan. The current chief is working to marginalise Imran Khan much as his predecessor did so that the army’s continued supremacy is not disturbed. Or is it that he, too, presides over a divided house as reports suggest with some, if not many, senior officers also swayed by Imran Khan’s appeal of attaining ‘Haqiqi Azadi’ or real freedom?
If there are then more questions than answers, it does appear as if all of Pakistan is engrossed in the act of questioning and answering. What is, in fact, truly extraordinary about the current crisis is how openly it is being played out. Every move and countermove of the contending fronts is analysed, discussed and disputed not just in the traditional media outlets of newspapers and television but in dozens upon dozens of YouTube commentaries and blogs. Traditional restraints and red lines, which have governed the media in Pakistan, appear to have been set aside and no aspect of the present impasse is a no-go area — familial relations, personal rivalries, ambitions and money-making are all part of the mix. After excluding the partisans, we find a new generation of Pakistani journalists and citizen journalists as if suddenly liberated by technology. In their accounts, we see a new Pakistan struggling to emerge from the old and, quite apart from the current contest, the country seems to stand at a historical turning point. Older voices, however, also remind us that the country has reached a turning point many times before in Pakistan’s history but, to paraphrase A.J.P. Taylor, finally chose not to turn.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan