[The former prime minister was detained and convicted on Saturday.
By Wednesday, the lower house of Parliament had been disbanded.]
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AFTER IMRAN KHAN’S ARREST, PAKISTAN’S NATIONAL ASSEMBLY IS
DISSOLVED  
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By Hasan Ali
August 11, 2023
The Nation
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_ The former prime minister was detained and convicted on Saturday.
By Wednesday, the lower house of Parliament had been disbanded. _

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif poses for a group
photograph with parliamentarians of the National Assembly outside the
Parliament house building in Islamabad on August 9, 2023., Aamir
Qureshi / AFP / Getty Images

 

On Wednesday afternoon, in the anteroom of Islamabad’s Parliament
house, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi expressed his shame at having been part of
“the worst assembly” in Pakistan’s history. In the farewell
session that followed before the assembly was finally dissolved, it
was easy to see why the member of Parliament—and former prime
minister himself—had reached this conclusion. More than a hundred
seats remained vacant throughout the session, some 15 months after the
then-recently ousted prime minister Imran Khan instructed members of
his party to resign en masse in protest.

But it was a Parliament of empty seats long before their resignations.
The election of Khan in the summer of 2018 had ushered in a period of
“hybrid democracy,” when decisions were principally taken by the
leadership of the Pakistan Army and defended by the civilian facade of
the Khan-led government, which became increasingly reliant on
governing through a series of ordinances. Human rights activists and
civil society watched with horror as one member after another from the
then-opposition, including Khan’s eventual successor, Shehbaz
Sharif, were either thrown in jail or harassed by the National
Accountability Bureau, an ostensibly anti-corruption agency that the
military has used to coerce politicians. At the time, Khan was
boastful of his involvement in their persecution. Five years later, he
is the one who finds himself in jail on dubious charges, with his
party crushed by the Pakistan army and his supporters cowed by the
fear of persecution.

Hours after the lower house of Parliament was dissolved, _The
Intercept_ published the text of a diplomatic cable
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by the then–Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed
Khan, detailing a meeting on March 7, 2022, with State Department
official Donald Lu, in which the United States is alleged to have
applied pressure for Khan’s removal. It will not come as a
revelation to readers of _The Nation _that the US has had a long
history of meddling in the affairs of other countries and of
instituting regime change either by force or coercion. But it would be
strange for the State Department, which has had a direct line to the
Pakistan Army for more than half a century, to use diplomatic
channels—in this case an ambassador who was certain to report the
meeting to the prime minister—to apply this pressure if it were
involved in a genuine conspiracy. What complicates this story even
further is that the United States has become something of a base for
Khan-supporting dissidents lobbying against the Pakistan Army and the
coalition government it helped cobble together after toppling Khan’s
government.

In an interview
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Nation_ at the end of June, Khan himself seemed to suggest that the
US pressure had come as the result of a secret lobbying effort
launched by Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful
army when the cable was sent. What is certain is that relations
between Khan and the top brass of the Pakistan army had broken down
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least four months before his visit to Russia, which took place on the
eve of the Ukraine invasion and was cited by Lu as the reason for
Washington’s anger.

After the military helped remove Khan through a vote of no confidence
in April 2022, it was hoped that Pakistan would experience something
of a reset. Some commentators opined that the army had acknowledged
its mistake in launching “Project Imran,” and that by removing its
support for the former premier, had created the conditions for a
return to the democratic norms of the decade before his victory.
Instead, the coalition government headed by Prime Minister Sharif
decided to forge a new consensus with the generals in Rawalpindi, and
whatever democracy had been left at the end of the Khan premiership
was trampled underfoot as a form of appeasement. In the last month of
the assembly’s tenure, more than a hundred pieces of legislation,
including amendments to the Official Secrets Act that seem designed to
prosecute Khan, have been bulldozed through Parliament without debate
or opposition.

Khan and his party have been accused of trying to foment a coup
against the chief of army staff, Gen. Asim Munir, after thousands of
Khan’s supporters laid siege to military installations in the
aftermath of his arrest on May 9. Since then, the military
establishment that brought Khan into power in 2018 has done everything
it can to erase him from the political process. Virtually the entire
top leadership of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, has
been forced to defect, with a rival party being created from scratch
to absorb these politicians. Khan himself has been convicted of
corruption in a case relating to his disposal of state gifts and the
alleged concealment of his assets. Now that the National Assembly has
been dissolved, the Constitution stipulates that general elections
must be held by November, at the latest—but there is no one in
Pakistan who expects this to happen. Rather, it is believed that a
caretaker setup of technocrats will be allowed to govern for as long
as it takes to purge the political system of Khan’s influence and to
ensure that he will no longer be able to control what remains of his
party.

That may yet be a very long time. The caretaker government in the
Punjab, for instance, which came in after Khan dissolved the
provincial assembly, has been in power for much longer than the
Constitution permits. In that time, it has seen it fit to lease more
than a million acres of state land to the army for corporate farming
and has been criticized by the judiciary for exceeding its
constitutional mandate. But then the Constitution, for the real
decision makers in Pakistan, has always been seen as a mere piece of
paper and democracy as a tiresome inconvenience.

At the end of this five-year term of the National Assembly, one
wonders if the same might not be said about the country’s
politicians.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_HASAN ALI is a journalist reporting on US foreign policy and South
Asian politics._

_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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_THE NATION [[link removed]] Founded by abolitionists in
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* Pakistan
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* Parliament
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* Military
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* regime change
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* elections
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* democracy
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