Long marches by Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri, and subsequent encampment in Islamabad, linger on as the most newsworthy issue in the country. As in the build-up to the (first historic and now, much maligned) general election held in May last year, partisan sentiment both for and against political manoeuvring by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) dots every television and drawing-room conversation. The space for rational, dispassionate analysis remains predictably small.

One of the normative fissures along which this debate has fragmented is the threat to democratic continuity — a slanted way of referring to the potential for covert or overt political intrusion by the military establishment. Almost like clockwork then, on August 28, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif met with both Khan and Qadri and gave his assurances that any investigation concerning rigging allegations would be conducted impartially. Whether the COAS intervened on the government’s request, or on the request of the protesters (who kept asking for the “umpire” to raise his finger), is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the army’s moral authority over the actors involved in this fracas was on display for all to see.

After several weeks of the tiresome protests, the apprehension now holding sway is that the deadlock – pivoted on the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif – may take the country back to the ‘politics of the 90s’.

The ‘politics of the 90s’ is an oft-used phrase that means a lot to a particular generation, and considerably less to another. The 18 to 30-year-old demographic, those who experienced politicisation during the lawyers’ movement and in the run-up to the 2013 elections, remain irreverent. For them, whatever happened in the 1990s – often an assessment formed by passed down stories and anecdotes (and never by a critical study of history) – is simply more evidence of why the ruling party needs to be marched, rallied, dharna-ed out of government. People of an older generation, however – regardless of any deep-seated predilection for democracy – remain wary of the instability and chaos that reigned during that period.

On a number of levels, what is happening right now is quite similar to events of that lost decade. There were long marches back then, abuses hurled at opposing leaders, and plenty of backdoor plots, which often took the shape of collusive endeavours with the military establishment. Electoral mandates were routinely questioned, and, to be completely fair, were often questionable.

Four governments were dismissed under the pretext of political instability and rampant corruption — three through covert army intervention and the last by a full-fledged military coup. The number goes up to five if one counts former COAS Waheed Kakar’s behind-the-scenes dismissal of the court-restored Nawaz Sharif government in 1993. That last instance gave birth to the ‘Kakar formula’ — a term that is suddenly back in vogue after the PTI’s ‘minus-one’ demand. Rather than acknowledging it as the primal display of unconstitutional power that it was, it is being bandied around by some PTI supporters as a scientific, almost noble manoeuvre that could resolve the current crisis.

A decade-long lesson

There is more than a dash of irony flavouring the events of this past month. Several Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PMLN) leaders have spoken about the ‘scripted’ nature of the PTI’s long march, and the inflexible approach taken by Khan. Many see it as a conspiracy to defang the government after it moved too quickly in areas deemed too sensitive. The irony quite obviously lies in the fact that the early 1990s were a time when the PMLN (or the earlier Islami Jamhoori Ittehad collective) played the lead role in several sketchy scripts.

Sharif’s cultivated debut and the PMLN’s eventual political consolidation in Punjab filled a major vacuum. Since the start of the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto years, no party (or for that matter, even a confederation of parties) had been able to adequately represent the disenchanted, Bhutto-bitten urbanites of the province.

What happened through the 1980s, therefore, was a series of manufactured alignments that brought an electorally relevant mass of politicians together in the shape of a reincarnated Muslim League. Central to this particular arrangement was a political pact between the Chaudrys of Gujrat and the Sharifs of Lahore, made under oath on the Holy Quran, in witness of the watchful eye of both Allah and Ziaul Haq’s hand-picked governor of Punjab, Ghulam Jillani.

The aim of the military establishment, and its junior partners in the bureaucracy, at that time (as it is now) was simple. They wanted the civilian executive space to be small; electoral victories to be personality and patronage-driven instead of being populist, and political parties to be factionalised instead of united. That way, cultivating internal dissent and getting some to move from one camp to another was a lot easier.

Much of this was driven by the fear of resurgent democratic sentiment and a renewed Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) after Benazir Bhutto’s arrival back in Pakistan in 1986. Her first term in government was constrained by several factors — a skewed constitutional framework, a predatory president, a rabid Punjab government led by Sharif, and a parliamentary majority dependent on easily swayed candidates. Right after she attempted to carve out a policy trajectory of her own, Sharif showed up in Islamabad with an antagonistic long march on General Ziaul Haq’s first death anniversary in 1989.

The government was soon after dismissed by an Army-President combination before completing even a second full year in office; Sharif’s mobilisation of independent members of the National Assembly (through the infamous Changa Manga incident), constant brinkmanship in opposition, and deeply acrimonious centre-Punjab relations played an enabling role in its fall.

To be fair to the PMLN, its relationship with the establishment transformed considerably after 1993. Having been brought into power through a heavily rigged election in 1990, Sharif encountered some of the same roadblocks in expanding his personal executive space that Benazir Bhutto had faced in her first term — Ghulam Ishaq Khan still occupied the Presidency, and the army was still incredibly territorial on all matters related to internal staff postings, the economy, and the foreign policy.

The PMLN in general, and Sharif in particular, began to realise (the hard way) that while it had been given office, its institutional mentor – the Pakistan Army – was simply unwilling to give up power. All subsequent attempts to expand the civilian space were met with a number of undercutting moves, eventually reaching a point where a highly charged, and visibly frustrated, television address put Prime Minister Sharif on a path of direct confrontation with the establishment-backed Presidency.

The PPP’s continuing protests and long march against electoral rigging provided the establishment the ‘instability’ pretext it needed to dismiss Sharif’s overreaching government. And this time, despite a Supreme Court restoration order, both former President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Sharif were still sent packing by COAS Kakar. Fresh elections were finally called in 1993 — round three in the space of six years.

The dismissal of Sharif’s 1993 government remains the first step in the eventual journey of the PMLN from an establishment-friendly club to an independent political party. This particular journey reached its culmination after the 1999 coup, when the party was taken apart by General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, its leaders put in prison, and the Sharifs eventually sent into exile. It was only then that Sharif realised that forming a confluence of interest with the establishment, as he had done historically against the PPP, would yield only short-term gains. In the long run, the space for civilians would remain curtailed, politics would continue to be acrimonious, and the eventual winner would always be the generals.

What came out of the ‘politics of the 90s’ was the Charter of Democracy (CoD), a document that enshrined the political science principle of “civilian elite consensus” against military incursions in the political domain. It was a product of a decade of pettiness, and unethical and unconstitutional collusions, which yielded no worthwhile benefit to either of the two main political parties. It remains a valuable lesson – learnt the hard way, yes – but a lesson nonetheless.

Arriving after the 1990s

The other major thing that emerged from the 1990s, one considerably more unfortunate than the CoD, was widespread distaste for conventional politics and a deep-seated hatred for politicians, especially among the urban propertied classes. No other figure captures this apathetic political milieu better than Imran Khan.

In some ways, Imran Khan circa 2014 is the logical outcome of a person growing up (politically) in the decade of bitter see-saw politics that the country witnessed prior to Musharraf’s intervention. There were even early signs of his now infamous derision towards all political figures. In June 1996, in the first few months of his political career, he used particularly harsh words to refer to the sitting Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

It was a brief, angry statement, but it showed back then how Imran Khan’s entire politics and world view was premised on his ability to distinguish himself from ‘politicians’. As his political career has evolved, it is clear that he still has no time for the nuances of Pakistan’s political field, nor for the many characters that have spent their entire adult lives navigating it. His speeches, especially the ones given in Islamabad over the past few weeks, remain fixated on corruption, and his demand for the removal of Prime Minister Sharif further reveals a thinking process that equates institutional malaise with one particular person.

The tiring part in all of this is that this particular variant of politics is neither new nor particularly imaginative. The idea that a corrupt coterie of political elites is all that is wrong with the country goes as far back as the 1950s. The first Constituent Assembly was dissolved on this very pretext, Ayub Khan’s Electoral Bodies Disqualification Order was meant to keep the same politicians out of politics, Ziaul Haq’s Martial Law Order 61 was used to ban PPP politicians from contesting polls, Musharraf’s educational requirement for parliamentarians was used to ‘breed’ new faces.

The common theme revealing itself across all these instances is that corruption remains a stick in the hands of the military to carve out greater space for itself.

Imran Khan, though, has developed his own reasons to pursue this course of action. His party was in danger of becoming an unimportant footnote in Punjab. Such a situation would have rendered any chances of future success at the centre close to zero. With the current mobilisation, the PTI has put itself back on the electoral map. It has managed to instigate partisan sentiment in supporters who had made peace with a PMLN government, and more importantly, it has forced the government to take several reactionary and self-damaging steps.

The entire dharna, in reality, is an internecine conflict being waged for control over Punjab but it just happens to be wearing a mask of principles. It is, at once, a product of Punjab’s relationship with the rest of the federation, and a product of Punjab’s own social development. There are now more eager elites in the province, spread across its many burgeoning, economically prosperous cities, than in other parts of the country. These are people with ambition, holding dreams of becoming even richer and more powerful.

The PTI provides political space to a fair portion of this aspirational demographic.

In the 1990s, it was Sharif in this role, giving voice to the first wave of big-thinking economic elites from urban Punjab. With no major party organisation to stand on, this was made possible by using two things that Punjab has but other provinces don’t — brinksmanship on the back of electoral numbers and a working relationship with the other sociologically Punjabi institution, the Pakistan Army.

Imran Khan strikes the same notes in a slightly more 21st century packaging. By mixing a heady cocktail of Islamo-Pakistani nationalism, the kind mostly found in patriotic Pakistan Studies textbooks, he provides a helpful shoulder to the centralising, ‘national interest’ tendencies held by the social and intellectual elite of Punjab, and of course, the military establishment.

His protest ignores the plight of the Baloch and the Sindhis because they do not figure in his crass power calculus. And while gains have been made through the 18th amendment – a truly democratic and federal legislative endeavour – they are being undone by a situation where two Punjabi parties are deadlocked over the control of an entire federation.

Like many other ‘fresh’ civilian faces before him (including Sharif circa 1985), Imran Khan and his party echo this mode of thinking either unknowingly or by design. Because he hasn’t been stung by the military (as yet), because he hasn’t had his mandate undercut by a coup, or faced prison or exile at the hands of a power-hungry general, he doesn’t realise that the confrontation game between two politicians results in a third-party winner. It is his assessment of himself, and his popularity, which allows him to invoke the army as a threat to a sitting government (his repeated assertion that “the umpire will raise his finger”), without realising that an intervention will lead to no personal gain in the long run.

Evolving subversion

An important thing that the PPP-PMLN détente, and a resulting five-year civilian term, has achieved is a strategic rethink within the military. Not one that results in the actual acceptance of civilian supremacy (that would be too much to ask), but more of a recalibration, allowing indirect interventions to counter this united civilian front. “Crisis is the new coup,” as an analyst put it so succinctly.

The idea behind the recalibration is simple: there are more politicians paying homage to the idea of democracy and civilian supremacy now than at any other point in the last three decades. The judiciary is less likely to be pliant as well. As a result, any attempt by civilians to assert themselves in the military’s conventional domains has to be subverted through a crisis — a little something to clip their wings rather than caging them altogether.

The PPP experienced several crises in its five years in government — the memogate commission, numerous media trials, an overly active judiciary, and a Qadri missile all the way from Canada. All of these contributed to the weakening of the government at crucial times, just when it seemed – to continue the bird metaphor – that it was beginning to flap its wings more freely.

There is also enough that suggests that the straight-up game of buying politicians, judges, and other actors and pitting them against each other is somewhat over. The new strategy is to find moments and contingencies where the interests of several stakeholders align with the interests of the military. Most recently, this took place in the realm of private media — the Geo debacle allowed the army to cultivate a stake with channels eager to pick up the fallen giant’s market share. A win-win for everyone, except obviously the civilian government and Geo.

Imran Khan’s sit-in protest appears to be another such moment of confluence. Some analysts have extracted all agency from PTI’s actions, preferring to pin it on the military’s machinations and a pre-prepared script. To be fair, the military did have not just one but three motives to destabilise the government — peace with India, Musharraf’s trial and a failure to take the ‘right side’ in the Geo debacle.

But as stated earlier, all that these protests do, scripted or not, is shrink not just the PMLN’s power but the overall democratic space maintained so painstakingly by the previous government and the then opposition. Even now, 10 parliamentary parties and their members – those that Imran Khan prefers to label as corrupt and collusive – see the danger in absolute positions and the PTI’s constant invocation of the army as an arbiter. They recognise how those who choose to stand away from this come out looking clean, while everyone else wipes mud from their faces. Everyone sees the damage such slinging, derision, and standoffs inflict on public discourse around the issue of democracy and civilian supremacy.

Everyone except Imran Khan, that is. A politician so consumed by his righteousness and by his pride, he has failed to recognise that his actions undermine the very field on which he plays. He pads his rhetoric every now and then by saying he doesn’t want martial law, that he wants democracy to continue, but then goes ahead and asks for a “government of technocrats”. Only someone who did not see the establishment’s pantomime of the 1990s from close quarters, someone who never saw the wounds inflicted on democracy by such venal grabs at power won’t believe that the only winner in a deal with the devil is the devil himself.

Pakistan will emerge from this crisis, battered and bruised, like it has on a number of previous occasions. But it will have lost plenty of civilian executive space to the military. It would have lost even more had every political party (barring the PTI) not learnt some valuable lessons from the past.

The writer would like to credit Abdul Majeed Abid’s series ‘90s ka Pakistan’, published by the Urdu edition of Dawn.com, for providing a helpful summary of the various political incidents that happened during that decade.