Pakistan’s powerful military has adopted Putin’s playbook by keeping the popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan out of the elections for the foreseeable future.
It’s the oldest trick in the book. If you hold power or political leverage in a country and you don’t want a rival to become president or prime minister, you simply have to make sure that he or she is not on the ballot paper. As simple as that. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been doing it for years. Any potential rival to Putin has either met their maker before time or jailed for an indefinite period. Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin and a potential political rival, was gunned down in 2015 in one of the most protected places in Moscow, the edge of Red Square. The popular opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned by Novichok nerve agent in his underpants, smeared there by Russia’s security service, FSB, according to a later investigation. Having survived the assassination attempt, he was kept off the ballot paper by a series of flawed allegations which have kept him in jail ever since.
It now appears that Pakistan’s powerful military has adopted Putin’s playbook by keeping the popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan out of elections for the foreseeable future. Khan was ousted as prime minister in April 2022 following a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, having fallen out with the military over senior army appointments. He fiercely maintains that this was hatched by the army in collusion with Washington. The cricketer-turned-politician will not be on the ballot paper on Thursday because he will be behind bars during the election serving a sentence which he and his supporters decry as “politically motivated” and “a conspiracy”. A Gallup Poll taken in January, just a month before the election, revealed that Khan remains the most popular politician at the national level.
Khan’s rise to power, and fall from grace, have both been attributed to the military.
Pakistan’s military ruled the country for decades, then faded into the shadows without relinquishing control. Back in 2018 Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and known for his populist politics, was portrayed as the change candidate at the time. But following his defenestration, he was sentenced to ten years in jail for leaking official secrets, plus a further fourteen years for corruption, just days before Pakistan’s general election on Thursday. Khan’s trial was carried out in secret behind closed doors with government-appointed prosecutor and defence teams. Khan’s own lawyers had therefore no chance to cross examine witnesses.
On the charge of violating Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act, prosecutors claimed that Khan shared the contents of a diplomatic cable at a political rally just before he was ousted from office. Waving the document from Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Khan had told supporters it was proof of a secret plot to unseat him. This was clear evidence, claimed the prosecutors that Khan shared secrets with his followers, not that anyone at the meeting could see what was written on the paper being waived by Khan. All this has contributed to the conspiracy theory that the military is working in concert with the judiciary to keep Khan out of the elections.
A Muslim-majority country of 241 million, Pakistan shares volatile borders with Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and is a close friend of China. So whoever comes to power in this nuclear-armed state matters. Amid wrangling over power, Khan’s administration was replaced by an unelected unwieldy multi-party coalition, led by Shahbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), who just happens to be brother of Nawaz Sharif, a leading contender in this week’s elections. The elections should have been held by last November at the latest, but after delays, which officials claim were caused by the census and which critics claim were due to boundary gerrymandering, the vote is finally going ahead on Thursday.
The military’s reported favourite for prime minister, Nawaz Sharif has found it difficult to galvanise support during the election campaign. Sharif, who was also ousted from office in 2017 and sentenced to ten years in jail for corruption involving multimillion pound London apartments in 2018, was given permission to leave Pakistan in 2019 to seek medical treatment abroad. Six years later, following a period in exile in a luxury London flat rather than in prison, Sharif is back in Pakistan. Just in time for the vote he has been speedily cleared of all charges while his lifetime ban on taking part in elections has been deemed unconstitutional.
Whether or not this magical legal experience will help Sharif mobilise support is unclear, but many believe he will be the next prime minister, even though he and his brother’s PML-N party is widely blamed for saddling Pakistan with sky-high inflation above 30 percent, soaring fuel prices and crippling levels of public debt. Last month the IMF released $700 million of a $3 billion stand-by arrangement which might bring some relief, but the legacy of the PML-N led coalition continues to exact a heavy toll.
Meanwhile, thousands of candidates from Imran Khan’s party PTI have had their nomination papers rejected while others have been hounded, harassed and detained for protesting his arrest last May. Even their election symbol, the cricket bat, has been deemed prohibited by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, a controversial ruling which critics believe is tantamount to banning the PTI by forcing its members to contest as independent candidates without a unifying symbol. To outsiders, the ban might not appear to be consequential, but in a country where 40 percent of the population are illiterate, most of them Khan’s supporters, the cricket bat symbol was essential to help them choose where to mark their ballot paper.
In a country where dynastic politicians are the norm rather than the exception, it comes as little surprise to see the chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), a third party in contention, to be the son of a former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. At just 35, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the Oxford-educated son of the assassinated Benazir and former president Asif Ali Zardari, served as foreign minister during the coalition government which followed Khan’s ousting. The manifesto produced by the PPP contains a number of crowd-pleasing and expensive pledges, such as doubling wages. He claims that the budget could be funded by government cuts and by taxing the wealthy, but few predict that Bilawal’s party will have the opportunity to enact the manifesto. Some political pundits have suggested that the PPP could be kingmaker in a governing alliance, but a hesitant Bhutto-Zardari told the BBC that such a predicament would put him “between the devil and the deep blue sea”.
From the outside, Pakistan’s forthcoming vote appears to be little different from the past, yet again with an unacceptable level of electoral engineering. No Pakistan prime minister has ever served their full five-year term in office, largely due to meddling by the military, and few would put their money on next Thursday’s winner breaking the mould. In November 2022, Pakistan’s retiring army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, acknowledged in his farewell speech that “the military has meddled in political matters for the past 70 years which is unconstitutional”, adding that “they have now decided they will not interfere in any political matter in the future”. Few see any evidence of this happening, and most observers believe it will take a very long time, if ever, for Pakistan’s military to meaningfully retreat to the confines of its constitutional role. And not imitate the corrupt practices of Vladimir Putin.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.