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Abstract
The 2013 election in Pakistan was a significant point in a presumed transition from autocracy towards democracy, since for the first time an elected government completed a full term and was replaced by another freely elected government. Pakistan’s hybrid regime, however, continues to be threatened by a significant ‘disloyal opposition’, in the form of secessionists in Balochistan and jihadi Islamists of the Tehrik-e-Taliban (the so-called Pakistan Taliban). Drawing on the literature on hybrid regimes, and using Juan Linz’s framework that focused on both ‘disloyal’ and ‘semi-loyal’ oppositions to democratic rule, this article examines the threat to a continuing movement towards democracy posed by secessionists, Islamists, and the military.
Acknowledgements
This paper originated as a short presentation to the Workshop on the Challenges to Governance in Pakistan, held at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, 21–22 March 2013. It draws also on a presentation for a workshop ‘Beyond Authoritarianism’ at Cornell University in 2011. I would like to thank the organisers of those two conferences, Ajay Behera and Valerie Bunce, respectively, for inviting me. Farzana Shaikh and Christophe Jaffrelot provided very helpful comments on the draft, as did the two anonymous reviewers for the Journal. All errors that remain are my sole responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I note that this sentence was written independently of my reading the opening sentence of Ian Talbot’s ‘Introduction’ to an edited volume on the democratic transition in Pakistan (Talbot, Citation2016, p. 10): ‘The Pakistan elections of May 2013 marked the first democratic transition between governments in the country’s history’; it is now something of a cliché, appearing in many accounts. It is worth noting that it was not at all clear that the army would continue to stay aloof from the political process and allow a change of government (see Fair, Citation2011, pp. 584–585).
2. I made use of the week-by-week compilation of press releases by FAFEN (the Free and Fair Election Network), which are no longer publically available at the site I used, http://www.fafen.org/site/v6/political-electoral-violence; the preliminary estimate of deaths from political violence was 400 (with more than 1000 injured). Retrieved May 20, 2013, from http://www.electionpakistan.org/press_release/detail_press/79.
3. The term ‘deep state’ was apparently first used for a ‘network’ in Turkey (see Filiu, Citation2015; Filkin, Citation2012; Gingeras, Citation2011; Söyler, Citation2013); according to Filkin (Citation2012),
The deep state is a presumed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups – anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order, established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk. The deep state, historians say, has functioned as a kind of shadow government, disseminating propaganda to whip up public fear or destabilising civilian governments not to its liking.
4. Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the TTP, in a letter to the media 10 days before the election, said that the goal of the TTP was to ‘end the democratic system’ and that democracy itself was ‘un-Islamic’ (The Express Tribune, 30 April 2013). For a comprehensive and convincing analysis of the history and current landscape of militancy, see Tankel (Citation2016).
5. Linz’s related concept of ‘semi-loyalty’, I will argue later, is particularly well suited to the Pakistan case.
6. Needless to say, there is not much more than vague assessments on how ‘loyal’ the military is, even in recent thoroughly researched works on the Pakistan military such as those by Nawaz (Citation2008), Fair (Citation2014), and Shah (Citation2016b). Some Pakistani journalists freely use the term ‘deep state’ to refer mainly to the intelligence services’ secret activities and instances of taking the law into their own hands (‘disappearing’ journalists and others who they see as a threat), but there is little doubt that those elements are not fully autonomous, even if the military high command maintains a shield of deniability for their actions.
7. That said, it is also true that suppressing this revolutionary movement entirely, let alone eliminating it, may well be beyond the capacity of the Pakistan state, especially given the likely scenario in Afghanistan.
8. The remaining ‘Islam pasand’ parties that I identified from the official result (from 266 of the 272 seats; as reported in the Express Tribune, 21 May 2013) bring the total to just over 6.5%. Rais (Citation2013), a leading political scientist, writes:
We have seen so many comments and argument saying that the religious parties have captured the soul of Pakistani society and they were not too far away from capturing its body, the polity. Nonsense. Their popular vote percentage is the lowest in any elections in Pakistan and their cumulative representation in the representative bodies has shrunk.
9. My calculations from provisional data as of 18 May 2013. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.electionpakistani.com/ge2013/result.html. Votes were concentrated enough, however, to produce three wins for the JI and nine for the JUI-F, out of 35 total seats.
10. In the democratic regimes Linz considers, the loyal opposition is singular; in a hybrid regime, the military and the ‘democrats’ are two factions of a loyal opposition, each oriented to a different strand of the regime’s legitimacy structure – to oversimplify: ‘law’ on the one hand, ‘order’ on the other.
11. Unfortunately, there are very few scholarly studies of how widespread these attitudes might be, with a particular lack of those dealing with citizens at the grass-roots level. Exceptions include Nelson (Citation2011) and Martin (Citation2016).
12. A useful recent introduction to the concept and its immense literature is Cassani (Citation2014, pp. 542–550); see also Morgenbesser (Citation2014). Aristotle says (Politics 4, 1290a): ‘so also of constitution there are held to be two forms, democracy and oligarchy; for men reckon aristocracy as a kind of oligarchy because it is oligarchy of a sort, and what is called constitutional government as democracy, just as in the case of the winds they reckon the west wind as a kind of north wind and the east wind as a kind of south wind. And the case is similar with musical modes, as some people say: for there too they posit two kinds, the Dorian mode and the Phrygian, and call the other scales some of them Dorian and the others Phrygian. For the most part therefore they are accustomed to think in this way about the constitutions; but it is truer and better to class them as we did, and assuming that there are two well-constructed forms, or else one, to say that the others are deviations, some from the well-blended constitution and the others from the best one, the more tense and masterful constitutions being oligarchic and the relaxed and soft ones demotic’. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D4%3Asection%3D1290a.
13. See the methodology section of Freedom in the World volumes. Even the traditional endpoints of other categorisations ‘totalitarian’ and ‘consolidated democracy’ are ideal types; actual regimes are all hybrids.
14. On this issue, see Gibson (Citation2005). This has been my experience as an academic advisor on countries of South Asia for Freedom House for a number of years. One major difficulty for scoring both India and Pakistan has been resolved by considering the Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Indian-controlled Kashmir separately, with neither affecting the scores of the ‘parent’ countries.
15. The literature in the last decade or so has moved away from an optimism (that I have shared) that hybrid regimes ‘in between’ full democracy and ‘politically closed authoritarian’ were, certainly in the long run, but probably soon, ‘in transition’ to democracy. More recent studies are more pessimistic, seeking to explain how and why such regimes are ‘sustainable’‘, perhaps even as stable a set of regimes as ‘full democracy’ is presumed to be (at the ‘end of history’). See Gilbert and Mohseni (Citation2011), Morlino (Citation2009), Ekman (Citation2009), Diamond (Citation2002), Carothers (Citation2002); Bogaards (Citation2012), among many others.
16. I would use as a test of whether a country has ceased to be a ‘national security state’‘, the certainty that in an existential national security crisis, the ultimate decision-making authority would not be the military.
17. In the colonial system Pakistan inherited and, by and large, did not disturb for six decades, the lower judiciary particularly was fused with, and subordinate to, the administrative wing of the government. The higher courts, from time to time, did act autonomously, but never seriously challenged a determined executive, particularly in a military government (see International Crisis Group, Citation2004, pp. 2–3 et passim; Oldenburg, Citation2016).
18. There are some scholars who think that remains a danger; see the discussion in Oldenburg (Citation2010, pp. 209–210).
19. It should be remembered also that Nawaz Sharif’s government of 1997, with a majority that allowed it to amend the constitution on its own, had attempted to control the media, overawe the judiciary, and bring the military under civilian control, probably in order to transform the democratic system into one in which its power could not be challenged.
20. Ijaz (Citation2013). See also Husain (Citation2013), which concludes: ‘Imran Khan’s toxic narrative only helps the Taliban and other militant groups that have declared war against the state. What is at stake is the future of democracy and the stability of the country’. According to Jon Boone’s report in The Guardian of 25 September 2013, ‘On Sunday [Imran Khan] suggested the church attack was a deliberate effort by unnamed forces to scupper talks. He also linked militant violence to US drone strikes, prompting his many critics to accuse him of making excuses for terrorism’ (Boone, Citation2013).
21. The assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, was convicted in October 2011, and hanged in February 2016; there were significant demonstrations in his support at all stages – arraignment, trial, and post-execution.
22. For an analysis of the relation of Islam and democracy, see Stepan (Citation2014).
23. Gregory’s (Citation2016) comprehensive account of how Pakistan’s civil-military relations fits into theoretical and comparative frameworks of the transition to democracy relieves me of the responsibility of providing a more detailed analysis.
24. There are important comparative cases to examine, countries that have successfully transitioned, curbing the military: Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey most significantly, as they are large population countries, ethnically fragmented, and with other important similarities to Pakistan (and of course many differences, including their national security situation). But there are also some comparable cases where the military has not been curbed, such as Egypt and Thailand (see Mietzner, Citation2014).
25. See Christine Fair’s concluding paragraph (Citation2011, p. 588): ‘Even if the army were to decide – for its own institutional reasons – that continued political intervention corrodes morale, discipline and professionalism, without a simultaneous increase in the civilians’ political will and capacity to govern any future withdrawal from politics will be transient. Moreover, given the army’s massive economic interests, the compulsion to stage future coups is likely to persist. It would appear that untying these various Gordian knots will remain well beyond the capabilities of Pakistan’s civilian leaders and institutions for the foreseeable future’. I suspect she would not change this assessment, five years later.