To change or to drift? Hobson’s choice for Pakistan
Pakistan is caught up in a whirlwind. The economy is stubbornly refusing to arrest its lengthening dip and start improving, the government has just completed its first year in power with an underwhelming show of competency and capacity, the main opposition leaders are in jail or running between courts to tackle political vendetta in the garb of accountability, the media has been hushed up amid rising censorship, the parliament has been gridlocked and no legislation is being done and galloping inflation is causing misery to the people and hurting their pockets
And if all this wasn’t enough, renewed confrontation with India on the Kashmir dispute has seen bilateral relations dip to their lowest in decades with the specter of war looming on the horizon. Uncertainty abounds.
Why does Pakistan find itself in this bind where little changes? And why did Pakistan mess up the one window of opportunity for better fortunes that opened up five years ago when the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity and started accelerating on the path to recovery and looked set on a sustainable growth trajectory after years of drift?
The answer to these questions is paradoxically fiendishly difficult and rather simple. The state has come to define for itself a national identity that emphasizes on what it’s not – Indian – rather than what it is, which is just another state that should be doing what all states do: strive to be normal instead of special and generate wealth for its own welfare through investment in its citizens to be educated, skilled, healthy, productive, and happy. However, the India-centric nationalism rooted in the bloody Partition of the sub-continent in 1947, which the state defines for itself, militates against development.
Additionally, the adoption of a top layer of centrist religious identity for itself that seeks to ‘otherize’ itself from India further makes Pakistan a “non-India, non-Hindu” political entity with the “unfinished agenda of Partition” in the shape of Kashmir.
This means the state’s central focus is on feeding this lingering identity crisis that needs to assert itself constantly until Kashmir is “resolved.” This is easier said than done after India and Pakistan went nuclear in the 1970s making it extremely difficult for a “Kashmir resolution” to occur to the satisfaction of both parties.
Controversial corruption trials that still haven’t concluded and hounding of businesses has converted Pakistan’s economic dream run into a nightmare.
Adnan Rehmat
Unfortunately, these early choices of identity have stuck and will not easily change and have, over the decades, trapped Pakistan into a one-sided choice between a development-oriented state and a security state.
Pakistan, of course, chose the latter whose consequence have now acquired a debilitating and critical mass of regression that is starting to display signs of being a runaway process of its own.
From 2013 onwards, when Nawaz Sharif came to power, Pakistan started to seemingly perform governance miracles – it successfully stamped out terrorism, dramatically improving the economy and putting development at the heart of governance.
Economic growth soared to its highest in five decades, tax collection nearly tripled, record development spending on infrastructure, education and health materialized, the stock market boomed (which at one point for three years was among the world’s fastest growing bourses), exports shot up dramatically and remittances and foreign direct investment ballooned to eye-popping levels.
For a while, it seemed Pakistan and India were going to be friends when Prime Minister Modi made a surprise stopover in Lahore to visit Sharif.
But it was not to be. Pakistan blew its chance to sustain this economic turnaround and instead chose to hound out and jail the very man and nearly all his team members who made it possible.
Controversial corruption trials that still haven’t concluded and hounding of businesses has converted Pakistan’s economic dream run into a nightmare. Economic growth is down two-thirds amid a record tax collection deficit, foreign investment has almost disappeared, development budget is a pale fraction of what it was from two years ago and taxes and inflation have crippled industry and consumers, increased unemployment and, according to the government itself, increased hunger in homes.
And while this dizzying collapse unfurled, Kashmir happened. First, the Pulwama terror attack – which was blamed on Islamabad – and India's retaliatory military strikes (and Pakistan’s downing of an Indian jet and its pilot). And then the change of political status of Kashmir within the Indian constitution by the Modi government, has forced Pakistan into a corner where the country’s India-centric religious nationalistic identity has been challenged. This has “necessitated” unwanted compulsions such as taking its eyes off economic recovery and ignoring social development.
This brings Pakistan to another strategic choice: make peace with its troubled past with India by abandoning the national prestige project of Kashmir or prioritize development. It’s a tough choice but there’s no option but to choose. Will Pakistan choose wisely this time?