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Road to perdition?
THE volatile events in Pakistan over the last year have been an upheaval in themselves. A political crisis morphed into an economic one that was then reinforced by a climate and security crisis. At this moment, Pakistan remains ensnared in a polycrisis, while recent political and economic events resemble the initial stages of a system entering a lethal tailspin.
Humans have a tendency to ascribe uniqueness to the crises they face, but history is replete with examples of nations facing and overcoming huge upheavals. Are we on the road to perdition or is there a way out?
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, details how seven different countries overcame national crises in his latest book Upheaval. Diamond offers a novel idea in which he argues that strategies that are employed to deal with various personal crises can also be used to overcome national crises.
The problematic nature of using individual level variables to explain macro, national and complex phenomena notwithstanding, the book carries instructive value on the nature, path and duration of crises. Diamond’s chosen cases include Indonesia and Chile.
What happened in Indonesia and Chile should serve as a warning to Pakistan as both countries ended up with brutal dictatorships after hounding out a single — arguably the most popular — political party.
Pakistan must come to grips with the present polycrisis as the upheaval now seems to be entering a violent phase.
In the case of Indonesia, under pressure from a foreign power, the military carried out a massive anti-communist purge killing over a million people, according to some estimates. Such intense brutality — brilliantly captured in the documentary, The Act of Killing — also served as a launching pad for the three-decade authoritarian rule of Gen Suharto.
In Chile, political polarisation and economic crisis in the wake of Salvador Allende’s socialist policies provided an opportunity for Gen Pinochet to stage a violent military coup.
The much-touted economic stabilisation under the Pinochet regime came at the expense of massive human rights violations that still figure extensively in the Chilean imagination. President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile recently vowed to keep looking for 1,200 victims of the Pinochet regime whose remains are yet to be found.
In a sense, what these case studies point out is that we are taught to think of our societies as linear systems, meaning that societies experiencing volatility — political or economic — can be brought under control; all we have to do is to identify the culprits and introduce disincentives. But, as Indonesia and Chile show, oftentimes political and economic crises take on a momentum of their own.
In the final analysis, the issue of who was responsible for unleashing a crisis becomes irrelevant. In reality, societies undergoing crises operate like complex systems in which multiple feedback loops snowball towards a complete system implosion.
What this shows is that the Pakistani state and society must come to grips with the present polycrisis, especially as this upheaval now seems to be entering a violent phase. But, to turn back from this road to perdition, the political leadership will have to sit across the table from each other and agree on the future rules of engagement.
Without a credible commitment to play by the rules, elections will only generate more chaos. Perhaps, the following recommendations can serve as a starting point for ensuring a smooth functioning of the political system during and after national elections.
In parliamentary systems, there is an expectation that the speaker will rise above partisan affiliation in order to conduct the business of the house in an impartial manner. However, events from last year show the need for neutrality for the speaker’s office for all legislatures so that other branches of government do not feel the need to intervene in order to remove the gridlock.
Perhaps, an innovative way to provide credible neutrality for the speaker is to require mutual consultation between the treasury and opposition just as it is required for the selection of the caretaker prime minister.
In the last one year, soaring inflation and poverty have made the lives of millions of Pakistanis very tough. Where some of these economic problems originated after the Russia-Ukraine conflict, political uncertainty, more than anything else, is the main driver of this economic crisis either because governments lost focus or were scared to take bold decisions given the steep political costs. This has not only damaged Pakistan’s international credibility but has also brought its economy dangerously close to the precipice.
One way in which the economy can be insulated from future political upheavals is through developing an apex ‘council of economic advisers’ that not only contains specialists, but also enjoys constitutional protection of tenure.
In the medium term, Pakistani politicians can also look at the example of Nepal that decided to introduce proportional representation in its electoral system in order to improve democratic representation. Where 60 per cent of the members are elected in single-member constituencies in first-past-the-post voting, 40pc of the members are elected through the proportional electoral system, where people vote for political parties taking the entire country as a single constituency.
Such an electoral arrangement holds the promise of encouraging some politicians to rise above parochial concerns and play at the national level.
Against the backdrop of what eventually came to pass in Indonesia and Chile, the future appears bleak. Pakistan’s present polycrisis is not showing any signs of blowing over. There is still time, however, to learn from this upheaval and chart a democratic path forward.
One hopes that the political leadership is going to sit down and talk to each other in order to agree on the rules of engagement. But, turning back from this road to perdition is going to be in the hands of Pakistan’s politicians.
The writer completed his doctorate in economics on a Fulbright scholarship.
Twitter: @AqdasAfzal
Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2023
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