Since 2022, the politics of Pakistan have been rocked by a struggle for power centered around former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan, who was ousted from office by a parliamentary no-confidence motion in April 2022, has alleged that his removal from office was orchestrated at the behest of the US government. This January, Khan was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking government documents as part of his effort to prove US involvement in his ouster. Khan’s saga has ignited mass protests across Pakistan over the past two years. Despite being imprisoned during national elections this February, Khan’s political party, PTI, won more parliamentary seats than any other political party. Journalist and policy analyst Raza Rumi joins The Marc Steiner Show for an in-depth look at Pakistan’s political crisis in the context of its long and turbulent struggle for democracy.
Raza Ahmad Rumi is a Pakistani writer and a public policy specialist. He is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media, Ithaca College, and founder of the digital media platform NayaDaur Media in collaboration with Pakistani diaspora in the United States.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s good to have you all with us. Today we continue our series of conversations about Pakistan; A nation that relishes and has fought for democracy but has been twisted between colonialism, military dictatorships, and Western support for those dictatorships – Specifically the US which continues to interfere in the internal politics of Pakistan, from instating coups to using it in its war against in Afghanistan and with the population seemingly at war with itself. There was an election on February 9 where the popular president who once was the darling of the military, Imran Khan – Whose party was banned and he languishes in prison – Received a majority of the votes. Then, all of a sudden, it didn’t. The crisis continues in this once ally of the US, its influential power broker in South Asia, and ally in the Afghan war.
Why is it falling apart? Why is it important to the world and what could be the consequences? We’re going to talk with Raza Ahmad Rumi, a Pakistani writer, and public policy specialist currently based in Ithaca where he’s a director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and has been teaching journalism in that department since 2015. He writes with numerous journals from The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and his own Friday Times, and was active in the political life of Pakistan and survived an assassination attempt. In 2014 they killed his driver and forced him to flee. He’s written books like Delhi by Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveler, The Fractious Path: Pakistan’s Democratic Transition, Identity, Faith and Conflict: Essays on Pakistan and Beyond, and Being Pakistani: Essays on the Arts, Culture and Society, and he writes about Sufism and the arts and culture of Pakistan. Raza Rumi, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Thank you so much, Marc.
Marc Steiner: Raza, as I said in the introduction, there was an attempted assassination on your life in Pakistan in 2014. Talk a bit about that. Why did they want to get rid of you? What was the assassination attempt about, that forced you to leave Pakistan in the beginning?
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Thank you, Marc. It’s now almost a decade, at the end of this month it will be a decade. It was mainly due to my media work. I had a career in public policy, civil service, and international development, and I turned to journalism in 2005-2006. Around that time I started writing, then I started editing papers, left all my jobs, and became a full-time media person. I was an editor of a paper, a TV broadcaster, and had a TV show. And because TV has a mass audience – Or whatever you write in the English language as a limited readership and traction – When you are on TV in the national language, the influence and the scope increase. Many of the things I used to say on television were not liked by a lot of powerful reporters in particular.
I was talking about the war on terror earlier; This was a time when Pakistan was in a serious grip of terrorism. And the thing there was the Pakistani government – And especially the military and the intelligence agencies – Had made some controversial decisions but they had also propped up all these non-state actors like the Taliban and Pakistani Taliban, and there were various offshoots, etc. So I was very vocal about that. I used to question the state policy on extremism and militancy, and I was, and I am, a big advocate for peace with India. That is considered treason. But for a variety of reasons. I used to get all these threats and letters on social media and I would think, well, these are to scare me, but I didn’t realize that they might result in a physical attempt.
So this was at the end of March 2014 when I’d finished my television show. I used to do a daily show on the TV where I was both a presenter and analyst. I finished that and I was going home and on my route I was attacked at a corner by a group of people; They fired a spray of bullets at my car, and the person who was driving the car died there and then. So I hired a guard after all these threats because the Pakistani branch of the Taliban had issued, in late December of 2013, a list of people who were on their hit list. They had posted it on their website. People told me, this was serious, so I’d hired a guard. The guard was also injured – I was luckily in the back seat of the car and I ducked and laid on the floor of the car protecting my head and body, and the bullets whizzed passed me; It was a very close call. I’m very fortunate, but a person died in front of me. So I had to leave because I was told to stay home for a couple of months, don’t go out, stop my media work, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I’m not going to.
Initially, I came to the US because my family, my siblings, are here. They’re on the East Coast. So I thought, okay, I’ll come for a few months and take a break. Then they arrested a group of militants who belonged to the Pakistani branch of the Taliban and other religious extremists. It’s very difficult to differentiate between these militants and Pakistan’s deep state because they have been so enmeshed for decades. So you don’t know who’s who and what is what, right? So then I was advised not to come back until these trials were over because I might be threatened or targeted again. That changed my life. But for years I had to deal with the trauma of seeing a human being die in front of me, and it’s still not gone, but I’ve struggled and dealt with it. In a way, being away and being in a small town like Ithaca was somewhat of a comfort because it allowed me to heal. But part of the reason that I’m still engaged with Pakistani media, write there, edit publications, and founded platforms is that I don’t want to give up just because this happened. I did not want to completely give up my passion and what interested and enthused me back then. So it’s a bit of a struggle.
Marc Steiner: So let’s start the news of the moment in this election of February 8, and this constant presence of the military, which is the power in Pakistan as opposed to any democratic process. So give folks a bit of background about what’s happening with it.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Yeah. Pakistan’s election concluded in early February, as you mentioned, and it was a hotly contested and contentious election. Before the election, for months before Pakistan’s powerful military establishment had taken all sorts of measures and used all instruments to ensure, from their perspective, that the former prime minister, the popular leader, Imran Khan, would not return to power. Imran Khan was the prime minister of Pakistan. He’s a celebrity. He was a hero of sorts in the game of cricket in Pakistan and South Asia and wherever cricket is played. Then he turned into a philanthropist and he joined politics and became the prime minister in 2018. He had very cordial relations with the military establishment, to say the least. But when he was in power from 2018 to 2022, he fell out with the military, and then he turned against them.
So this election was due, and they had ensured that his party should suffer at the ballot box, but his supporters defied all such restrictions and came out in large numbers and voted for the candidates that belonged to Imran Khan’s party. That was a big shock for the plans of the establishment. So then they managed to cobble together a coalition of all the other parties that were opposed to Imran Khan. But you see, it is not going to lead to political stability because Imran Khan’s party has big numbers in the Parliament and they have widespread support, especially among the younger people. I want to add that Pakistan is a country of youth; More than two-thirds of the population is below the age of 35, and that means it’s a different kind of society we are dealing with.
We have the old-school military establishment, the bureaucracy, the older parties, and you have this young, new dynamic politics led by Imran Khan and his supporters. They are now at loggerheads with each other and that is what is a challenge for the country. The country’s mired in a big crisis, an especially economic crisis, where it is now seeking a big IMF loan to stay afloat and to repay the huge foreign debt that Pakistan has accumulated in the past decades. So without political stability, without the legitimacy of the government at the helm, it would be difficult to manage the economy.
Marc Steiner: I’m going to take it backward for a moment and talk a bit about Pakistan, its history, and why it is where it is at the moment. It used to have this booming economy. Now, it’s falling behind India whose economy is booming and Pakistan is in debt and economically disintegrating on some levels. And you have the military, which constantly seizes power in this multinational nation of many different groups that are thrust together in one country. You also have the element of the US, which if you look at the cables that were sent before, had something to do with Imran Khan’s downfall and the military seizing power again, and then Sherif coming; the prime minister. So talk about that political dynamic, why it exists, and how it exists.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: The thing with Imran Khan is he has stated on many, many occasions that he’s not a traditional politician, which means that he’s a populist. He’s an out-of-box political character, a bit like former president Trump, who states that he’s against the establishment. He’s not one of these typical corrupt politicians in Washington, DC, he’s different, etc. And this claim has been made by other populists across the globe as well. Whether it’s Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, to some degree, even the former prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, who used to make all these populist claims and took Britain out of Brexit and et cetera, et cetera.
Imran Khan belongs to that particular creed because he’s a disruptor of the old political order. He’s liked and he’s loved as well because people are sick of the status quo politics in Pakistan like many other countries. They think that such a strong leader, such a strong man can bring about systemic change, shift things around for their daily lives, improve the economy, improve Pakistan’s standing in the international community, and bring that nationalistic pride. Now, this is somewhat in conflict with the political structure that we have in Pakistan; It’s a constitutional democracy, at least notionally. It is a constitution that follows a parliamentary democracy. Despite the fledgling and the weak democracy, it has some rules of the game as well.
So Imran Khan says, well, what are these rules? I am above the rules. So in a way, that particular tension is at the core. Imran has been labeling his political opponents as corrupt, and the truth is, that Pakistan’s political system, like most political systems in the world, is corrupt. There’s no denying it. Political campaigning, campaign finances, what politicians do in power, and how they dole out money, benefits, and patronage to their supporters. It’s all well-known. It’s a big game. Imran promised that he would end that. He’s against that kind of politics and that’s why a lot of people supported him for the past decade, at least.
But when he became the Prime Minister, he had to play by the book. So two things he had to do: One, he was heading a coalition government. He had to appease his coalition partners and indulge in the old-school politics. At the same time, he had to work with the powerful military, which always wanted to dominate the political scene. And the previous politicians, his opponents, also had to deal with the same dilemma. The former prime minister, Sharif, who was Pakistan’s prime minister three times, was ousted by the military every time he was in power. He could not complete his term. The late Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, was prime minister of Pakistan twice, and she was also ousted by the military. So this is a dilemma that Imran Khan faced, and he still faces, but his rhetoric and his populism are appealing and have found widespread traction within the country.
Marc Steiner: I guess he does have his problems since he’s facing prison for 17 years or more on two of what people say are trumped-up charges, even though with his party being banned, he won the votes, and still they didn’t rule Pakistan. So the question I have to parse this out is why is the military so strong in Pakistan? What is the political dynamic that allows that to happen? I was reading about how a woman, Manzari, who was a human rights activist and lawyer was also put in prison after she made a speech against the military. There are so many political prisoners in Pakistan and the US seems to be, from everything I’ve read, deeply involved with the Pakistani military and the coups that are taking place inside Pakistan. So parse this political dynamic out.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Yeah, yeah. This is a very important point that you’ve raised. A lot of it has to do with Pakistan’s colonial experience. Pakistan was a British colony. Part of India later on emerged as an independent country, in 1947, and in this part of the Indian subcontinent, the political and civic institutions were weak. What you had was an overdeveloped state. Terrorists and political scientists have called it that. The British military and the British Civil Service were the most powerful institutions; They ruled and they sided everything almost for 200 years or so. Pakistan was an inheritor to this British system and these two institutions maintained their dominance for a long time. There was no general election in Pakistan between 1947 and 1970, so you can imagine that they had an anathema for democracy, despite all the lip service and rhetoric.
Within the first decade, after very weak prime ministers and multiple governments, Pakistan went under military rule under General Ayub Khan. This was the height of the Cold War era in 1958, and Ayub Khan ruled Pakistan for more than a decade with the support of the West and especially the US. So there’s a big foreign dimension that Pakistan’s domestic political evolution has been influenced by the global security dynamics. Ayub Khan was propped up as this military leader, supported by the US, and given lots of military and civilian aid because he was useful as a bulwark against the evil communists. Later on in the 1980s – During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 – For another decade or so, Pakistan was involved in that war against the evil Soviets in Afghanistan, where Pakistan propped up and trained Mujahideen with the financial and military support of the US and Saudi Arabia and others.
That was the time when the second powerful dictator, General Zia, ruled Pakistan. So I’m trying to bring in these connections that yes, there are domestic variables of history and the way political structures exist, but this kind of situation has also been largely aided by the Western countries, especially the US. We know in the more recent years, General Musharraf who had taken power in 1999 through a coup and who was not accepted by the US, at least formally, suddenly became the most favored leader of the US after the 9/11 attacks and after the so-called war on terror. Then Musharraf was everywhere in the foreign capitals and Pakistan’s military aid was resumed. So common themes: US aid, support for military dictators, and undermining of domestic democratization on the evolution of democratic institutions. Now, this is baggage.
To understand what is happening in 2024, we have to look at what has been happening in the troubled history of 75 years. That is what we are grappling with here because these young people… Pakistan is now a country of 240 million people. It’s still the fifth most populous country in the world. People want a voice. They want a say in their governance., in day-to-day affairs, in policymaking, and in how the country behaves and acts. And there’s a stranglehold of the old elites, the military, the bureaucracy, and the political class, which has been in bed with the military. That’s why the politicians in Pakistan have to work with a military, which is a euphemism for seeking their blessings and support to gain and sustain power.
Marc Steiner: Help me understand a few things here. The US was involved in the removal of the prime minister, of the president. The Intercept exposed the cables that took place between the US and the military of Pakistan, especially when the president went to Russia. So it seems, in many ways, the US sees it’s in its interest to control what happens in Pakistan, to support the military, and to thwart democracy, but at the same time it alleges that it’s supporting democracy. That is part of a dynamic that we don’t talk about a lot in terms of what’s happening in Pakistan. And it doesn’t control everything, but it is part of what underlies the problem facing Pakistan.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Yeah. The US’s role in Pakistan’s history cannot be minimized and cannot be written off. It’s an open secret that the US administration did not like the fact that Imran Khan, the then-prime minister, visited Russia and was in Moscow the day Russia attacked Ukraine. In terms of optics, it was problematic because Pakistan is a longtime ally and dependent on the US as a weaker and poorer country. And there’s no secret that they did not like Imran Khan, the Americans.
But the cables that you referred to certainly testify to this fact that what the US State Department’s mid-level officials said to the ambassador of Pakistan in Washington DC, that the relationship between the two countries will improve once the government changes. This is being interpreted as a call to remove that government within the country. I don’t think that it is as clear or simple as that because remember that the relationship between Pakistan and the US is a security relationship; It has been securitized beyond belief and the US military and the Pakistan military have a direct line. For that matter, the CIA or the Pakistan Intelligence Agency, the ISI would be also directly connected by that, I’m assuming.
Marc Steiner: From the beginning. From the beginning of Pakistan and India, the US has always backed Pakistan and backed its military as a counterweight to India’s being friendly to the Soviet Union and the left. So that was always part of the dynamic.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Exactly, exactly. Well put, Marc. So I don’t think that the US would be asking the Pakistani ambassador for a regime change. Some mid-to-high-level CIA official could very easily call his or her counterpart in Pakistan and tell them, hey, get rid of this guy. They don’t have to state that in a diplomatic meeting. So that’s why that whole theory… Yes, the US’s role is contentious, it should not be there. The US has played that role in Latin America and other parts of the world, including Pakistan. But in this case, it’s not that crystal clear. However, Imran Khan did use it in the public once. When he was facing a vote of no confidence in Parliament, he came out in a public rally and he waved that cable and he said, look, the US wants to get rid of me.
Later on, he and his party used this particular cable to garner popular support and tell the people that he was being thrown out of power because the US wanted him out. The US does not like him because of Pakistan’s problematic history and the asymmetrical nature of power relations. There is resentment against the US’s role, especially during the so-called war on terror when thousands and thousands of Pakistani civilians, soldiers, and security officials have lost their lives in the northwestern part of the country, and the fact that Pakistan became the theater of war itself. There are a lot of those fresh wounds and memories that propel and fan anti-Americanism, so Imran Khan was able to capture that moment. Later on, he denied these things, he changed his statements. He said, no, the US did not directly call for my removal. It was the Pakistani military that wanted me out, but they wanted a green light from the US. Later on, he said, no, something else happened.
As a populist leader, his followers believe every statement he makes. It’s just like Trump. If Trump said it’s dark outside, they’ll say, yeah, there is dark. It’s a conspiracy by the loony left that the sun is shining outside. I’ve been living here for a decade now, Marc. I’m a read follower of Trumpism and the right-wing narratives.
Marc Steiner: But you see, in some ways, a political dynamic and connection between the political movement, not directly, but the political wave that pushes Trump is the same one that pushed Khan.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Yes, yes. There are many similarities, and I’ll outline them. First and foremost, Trump has not emerged from a traditional political party structure. He’s not been a mayor of a town, then entered Congress or ran for Senate and served on house committees, understands the business of the government or the legislative affairs, etc. In a way, he’s an outsider, and that is what is appealing to his fan base. That he’s a good guy. He’s rich, he’s smart, he’s a reality TV star. He has Trump Towers. He doesn’t mince his words. He can be racist when he wants to be. He can be a sexist when he wants to be. See, he’s so honest. That’s what people told me when I interviewed them in 2016 when I was stunned by the Trump phenomenon. I was asking people, why do you support him? In upstate New York, he has a huge base, by the way, in the rural areas. And they were like, he’s honest. He says what he wants to say. In other words, he says things we want to say, but we are being told by the –
Marc Steiner: And you’re saying Khan is the same way?
Raza Ahmad Rumi: – Yeah, Khan is exactly. Then the rising income, inequality, and economic hardship in Pakistan, that is something that Khan has been able to highlight. He blames corruption as the reason why people are poor, why people are not getting their due. So for a decade, his politics were around an anti-corruption narrative where he said he would end corruption because he’s honest. Compared to other politicians, because he’s not a traditional politician, he has far fewer scandals under his belt. Only when he was a prime minister, he’s been accused of some wrongdoing, and the courts are adjudicating on that. It’s too early to say whether those charges are real or trumped up. But Khan has a reputation for being relatively cleaner than other politicians in Pakistan. So that’s the economic anxieties. It’s also a crisis of the capitalist order and the neoliberal policies that Pakistan has been implementing. Now, this IMF program which is currently underway, is the 25th or so, if I’m not wrong.
Marc Steiner: Yeah, the 25th. Yeah.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: Yeah. For 25 programs, Pakistan has been implementing. The IMF says, you don’t implement it fully, you don’t listen to us. We the neoliberal doctors know what’s good for you. All of that has resulted in a lot of economic hardship. People want a leadership that can improve their daily lives, and in a way, this crisis of capitalism has engulfed other countries, and Pakistan is included in that.
Marc Steiner: So let me ask you this question to close out here, because it’s important with what you just raised. The Western neoliberal agenda has affected what’s happening in Pakistan, and you talked a bit about the contradictions inside of capitalism that are affecting Pakistan. Talk a bit about what you see as the immediate and future of Pakistan with Khan, with the power, and with his popular support. With the military in power, what do you see happening next? How’s that going to affect the dynamic between the US and Pakistan and the whole South Asian region? Where do you see it going?
Raza Ahmad Rumi: That’s a very important question. What happens and what is. The issue for now is the military has been able to manage the situation by installing a government of their choice. It’s a coalition government. It’s a government that will be very subservient to the military’s whims, and for now, they’ve kept Imran Khan locked up. But with such a strong public opinion in favor of Imran Khan which is also by default turning into an anti-military popular expression, it is not a sustainable situation. Sooner or later, within a year or so, I see the military in Pakistan enter into some kind of an arrangement or a deal with Imran Khan whereby they give him concessions, bring him out of jail, and perhaps tell him okay, we will go for another election and we won’t impede your return to power, provided you don’t rile the public opinion against us.
Imran Khan has been saying that he’s willing to talk to the military. He says that he wants to open the dialogue, but they don’t want to talk to him, which is also his very brazen way because he doesn’t want to talk to his political opponents. He doesn’t want to talk to other parties in the parliament so this issue of civil-military imbalance can be tackled on a long-term basis, he says he wants to deal directly with the military. So I think that could happen. That’s one thing.
Now, what happens in the region is the new government, because of Pakistan’s economic compulsions, has gone to three wars with its neighbor, India, a much bigger country. India is now booming in economic terms. And on the other side is China, another success story in economic terms. So Pakistan will perhaps try and open up a trade with India to revive its economy and perhaps generate more economic activity. In that process, they might have to get back to Imran Khan and get his tacit support that he doesn’t oppose that kind of a deal. Again, it would be a great nationalist rhetoric line to normalize things with India, which has been a traditional enemy of Pakistan since the country’s creation.
But in short, to answer your very important and complex question in one or two lines is that it is uncertain. There is more uncertainty and more instability in the short term. The only way Pakistan can be a more stable, functional democracy is where the military takes a back seat and lets civilian politicians and the constitution operate independently of their interference. Otherwise, it is going to always create a situation where you have some imbalance and some systemic shock. Let’s hope that the politicians, and especially Imran Khan, understand that it is vital for the political actors and the political class as representatives of the people to forge unity and bring in laws, reform structures, and reform the political system to stop this military’s excessive interventionism.
Marc Steiner: Raza Rumi, I want to thank you so much for this conversation. There’s so much more to cover. I look forward to exploring more about Pakistan and its effect on not just Pakistan and South Asia, but its effect on the globe and the dynamic of the US involved in that as well. Thank you so much for your work, and your writing, and I appreciate you taking the time today.
Raza Ahmad Rumi: You are most welcome.
Marc Steiner: Once again, let me say thank you to Raza Rumi for his work and for joining us today. And thank you all for joining us today. We’re going to link to the work of Raza Rumi and articles from Pakistan on our site here at The Real News Network, and we’ll be bringing you more conversations and stories about the importance of Pakistan often overlooked by the major media. And thanks to David Hebden for running the show today and editing this program, to the tireless Kayla Rivara for making all that’s possible behind the scenes, and to everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Now, please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at MSS@therealnews.com, and I will get back to you right away. Once again, thanks Raza Rumi for being here today, and thank you all for joining us. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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