There’s an interesting term in political science called ‘self-coup.’ A self-coup is when an elected president or prime minister tries to retain or expand their power through unconstitutional/ extra-constitutional means and by instigating their supporters to create chaos in the streets.

They cultivate support in civil society and in state institutions and then use this support to enact a self-coup. Supporters are encouraged to adopt what is called ‘incivism’. Simply put, incivism refers to being hostile towards state institutions and the government.

In an April 2022 essay, the American political scientist David Pion-Berlin wrote that one of the clearest recent examples of a self-coup attempt was the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol building in Washington DC by Donald Trump’s supporters. Trump had refused to accept the November 2020 election results, in which he lost the presidency.

Just days before the winning candidate Joe Biden was to be inaugurated as the new US president, Trump encouraged his supporters to reject the election results. After an incendiary speech by him, hundreds of his supporters attacked the Capitol building. There is also a strong likelihood that Trump believed he would be able to draw support from some elements in the military and the judiciary — apart from, of course, civilian far-right groups. According to Pion-Berlin, self-coups can’t succeed if they fail to attract any support from the armed forces.

Heads of state, such as Donald Trump and Yoon Suk Yeol, have instigated ‘self-coups’ in an attempt to hold on to power. But can the May 9, 2023 acts of violence in Pakistan also be classified as an attempt at a ‘self-coup’?

Hundreds of Trump supporters, mainly from radical-right outfits, did pour out and exhibited incivism by attacking the Capitol, an important symbol of American democracy. But the US armed forces refused to offer any support. In fact, the military ordered the deployment of the National Guard.

However, this was a tense stand-off because some analysts worried that the deployed Guards might be tempted to support Trump because various studies had demonstrated that strong right-wing networks existed within the US military. But nothing of the sort happened.

There have been at least 22 successful self-coups in various countries between the 1850s and 2021. In each of these, the sitting head of state/government was successful in drawing support from the armed forces (and, in many cases, from the judiciary as well). But there are an equal number of examples of failed self-coup attempts. The most recent one was the one attempted by the South Korean head of state, Yoon Suk Yeol.

On December 5 this year, the former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was indicted by a court for “inciting violence against the military.” He is accused of doing this in 2023, which led to the infamous May 9/10 protests of that year, in which his supporters attacked multiple military buildings.

Soon, he was being accused by his detractors of trying to instigate a mutiny in the military against its chief, Gen Asim Munir. Apparently, ‘the plan’ was to use unprecedented attacks on military properties to rouse the emotions of so-called ‘pro-Khan’ generals who were then expected to topple the ‘anti-Khan’ Gen Munir, dissolve the current government, and reinstate Khan as PM.

If proven, can this be understood as a case of an attempted self-coup? Yes and no. First of all, Khan stopped being prime minister in April 2022, when he was removed through a vote of no-confidence. He wasn’t a sitting head of government. So, at least on this account, one can’t call what he is being accused of as a self-coup. Sitting heads of government/ state planning a self-coup understand the importance of drawing support from the armed forces. Therefore, they will never try to offend or attack them, especially the military.

But right after Khan was ousted in 2022, he began to severely criticise the military for abandoning him and supporting the “corrupt parties” who had managed to orchestrate a successful no-confidence vote against him in the parliament. So, can his alleged attempt to incite mutiny in the military still be referred to as a self-coup? On this account also, no.

Yet, there are some major characteristics of a self-coup in what transpired in May 2023. Even though a leader was not in power, he was allegedly looking towards the military to restore him. This may sound peculiar, given his post-ouster outbursts against the institution; but Khan was quite vocal in stating that most of the military was on his side. So, he may have believed that there were enough supporters of his in the institution.

The previous military chief, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, who played a prominent role in the so-called ‘Imran Khan Project’, admitted that there were many within the military who supported Khan. A 2022 report on the Al-Jazeera website quoted Kamran Bokhari, an analyst at the New Lines Institute for Strategy think-tank in Washington, as saying that, when Bajwa retired in late 2022, he left behind a significantly divided military, “many of whom were still rooting for Khan.”

Bajwa’s successor, Gen Munir, spent a whole year after his appointment in November 2022 tactfully sidelining and then ousting Khan’s supporters from the institution. Nevertheless, if Khan were hoping to rouse these uniformed supporters in May 2023, he failed.

Khan also enjoyed support in the judiciary which, on quite a few occasions, did jump in to mitigate the disastrous impact that the May 2023 violence had on Khan’s political fate. However, Khan is of the view that the violence was staged by the military. He calls it “a red flag operation.”

But whereas accusations of him trying to instigate a mutiny in the military are still just allegations, they seem to be gaining more acceptance among various political commentators than his claim that the May 2023 violence was a red flag operation. So, if he did try to trigger a mutiny in a bid to return to power, was it a self-coup?

Self-coups involve a civilian leader drawing support from powerful state institutions to help him execute his extra-constitutional plans. But since Khan was not a sitting head of government, one will have to understand his alleged plan as a partial self-coup attempt.

The military will have to establish that Khan was indeed trying to trigger a mutiny with help from his supporters within the armed forces. If proven, then this can be explained as a ‘conspiracy’ authored by a civilian leader, in concert with some senior military officers, to oust a sitting military chief: a self-coup attempt, but one in which the civilian leader was not in power, yet enjoyed support in vital state institutions, and a civilian support base willing to enact unprecedented acts of incivism.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 29th, 2024