The highlights this week: Pakistan readies for elections that will follow the usual script, an Indian government spokesperson affirms the country’s engagement with the Taliban, and a Sri Lankan cabinet minister resigns amid a health care scandal.
Pakistan’s Elections Will Follow the Usual Script
A top Pakistani political party is subjected to a harsh crackdown ahead of national elections. Its members are harassed, abducted, and arrested. Media outlets are pressured not to cover any of the party’s activities, and critics of this repression are silenced. The party’s top leader is given a long jail sentence on the eve of the polls.
This was the situation for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in 2018. Today, the PML-N is contesting Pakistan’s Feb. 8 elections with no problems, and it is former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party that is receiving this treatment. Hundreds of PTI supporters have been arrested, the party’s top leadership is hollowed out, and the already-imprisoned Khan received three new sentences within 10 days of Thursday’s vote.
Thanks to court rulings, the PTI is reduced to fielding candidates as independents, who are denied the use of the party’s symbol (a cricket bat) on the ballot in a country with a 40 percent illiteracy rate. The PTI’s plight is an especially intense manifestation of a long-running pattern in Pakistan: The all-powerful military uses a range of tactics to shape the electoral environment in ways that weaken the parties it doesn’t want in power.
What has happened in the lead-up to the Feb. 8 elections is not new, but the backdrop it has played out against may be unique. The country is facing a convergence of acute crises: economic stress so severe that the upper classes are feeling the pinch, upsurges in terrorism, worsening border tensions, and dangerous levels of political polarization. Pakistanis’ pessimism about the economy, elections, and safety is at the highest levels in years.
The confrontation between Khan and the military leadership has been aggressive and sometimes violent. Khan blamed the military for orchestrating his ouster in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022. After being targeted in an assassination attempt that November, he escalated his campaign against the military establishment, leveling allegations against senior security officials and calling them out by name—practically unheard of from a former prime minister.
After Khan was arrested last May on corruption charges, protesters attacked military facilities, including the General Headquarters building. Rarely had political violence taken such direct aim at Pakistan’s military, which has long held a sacrosanct status. The military dramatically ramped up its crackdown against the PTI. In turn, public anger with the military surged, fueling a crisis of confidence that runs deep: Some military officers have reportedly faced discipline for retaining support for Khan.
Social media has in part exacerbated this anger and polarization leading into the elections. PTI supporters have vented on online platforms, and some hard-liners have developed large followings by directing withering criticism at the military on social media. Many vocal PTI supporters have turned to anonymous accounts, fearing retaliation by a state that has restricted internet access during the party’s online campaign events. (The PTI cannot mobilize offline.)
The outcome of the elections on Thursday is unlikely to be stabilizing. The next government will probably be a weak and fractious coalition; if turnout is low, it will lack a strong mandate. The losers will bitterly reject the elections result, hardening public anger, especially among PTI supporters. Despite everything, Khan’s party is rallying its supporters with get-out-the-vote calls and contesting elections with independents on the ballot—but the cause is seemingly futile.
Keen to play a leading role in Pakistan’s economic recovery, the military is unlikely to retreat to the barracks after the elections. This could set the stage for a new crisis—especially if PML-N’s Nawaz Sharif, who sparred with the Army during his previous terms as prime minister, returns to power. Sharif’s relationship with the military has tended to blow hot and cold. Today, he is back in the military’s good graces: His experience likely makes the military think he can stabilize the economy—and he is a bitter rival of Khan.
Any fresh political tensions could distract policymakers from addressing critical social, economic, and security challenges, just as Khan’s confrontation with the military has. For many Pakistanis, these elections could be the latest sequel of a movie they prefer not to watch.
India affirms engagement with the Taliban. After an Indian delegation participated in a regional conference in Kabul hosted by the Taliban in late January, a spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs clarified last week New Delhi’s relationship with the Taliban, noting that the Indian government engages with the group in “various formats.” The spokesperson said the diplomat who heads the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which is open for limited activities, emphasized India’s commitment to deliver humanitarian aid at the regional meeting.
India tends to emphasize people-to-people relations in its public comments about ties with Taliban-led Afghanistan. But the official relationship has progressed as well, even if India doesn’t recognize the Taliban regime. Last November, diplomats loyal to the pre-Taliban government closed the Afghan Embassy in New Delhi, citing a lack of support from India. Meanwhile, the Indian Embassy in Kabul was partially reopened in June 2022.
New Delhi has compelling reasons to pursue a workable relationship with the Taliban, despite long-standing enmities. Deepening engagement with the Taliban enables India to push back against Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan. Its on-the-ground presence in Kabul also facilitates India’s ability to monitor terrorism threats emanating from Afghanistan, from the Islamic State-Khorasan to groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, which target India.
Biden writes to Hasina. U.S. President Joe Biden wrote a letter to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina stating his desire to work together as the bilateral relationship moves into a new phase. The letter, published by the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka on Monday, mentions cooperation on security, economic, climate change, energy, health, and humanitarian issues. It does not touch on democracy.
News of Biden’s letter surfaced about a month after Bangladesh’s general elections, which the U.S. State Department characterized as not free or fair. The move suggests the Biden administration is keen to focus on shared interests after unsuccessfully pressing Hasina to hold credible elections and promote respect for human rights. In fact, Washington’s priorities in its relationship with Dhaka appeared to be shifting before the elections took place.
The United States said little publicly about the elections in the weeks leading up to the vote, and the State Department message took a relatively soft tone. Clearly, strategic concerns are at play. Washington hopes to deepen cooperation with Dhaka to counter Chinese and Russian influence in Bangladesh. Its focus on democracy also seemingly emboldened its two rivals, giving them a pretext to accuse the United States of meddling in Bangladesh’s politics.
Sri Lankan cabinet minister resigns after arrest. Sri Lankan Environment Minister Keheliya Rambukwella resigned this week after being arrested last Friday. Rambukwella, who served as health minister until last October, is under investigation for alleged involvement in obtaining counterfeit drugs during the height of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis in 2022, when the country’s medical supplies ran critically low.
Rambukwella is accused of using the economic crisis as a pretext to avoid legal tender processes so that he could work with a favored supplier. The Sri Lankan Health Ministry is investigating cases of hospital patients dying or suffering impairments in the last two years; medical unions, opposition politicians, and activists allege that poor-quality drugs affected the patients’ care.
Pressure was growing on Colombo to remove Rambukwella and conduct an investigation. After all, Sri Lanka holds elections later this year. Rambukwella will be held for investigation until Feb. 15. The alleged counterfeit drug supplier and five other senior Health Ministry officials were also arrested.
On Monday, Pakistan’s military released a statement saying that a naval operation rescued a ship with nine stranded Indian sailors marooned in the Arabian Sea. According to the statement, the ship had a technical problem, and the Pakistan Navy responded to a distress call. The statement didn’t indicate what type of ship the Indians were on, but it said it continued its trip to the United Arab Emirates.
The reported rescue comes several days after the Indian Navy rescued a Pakistani crew on a ship hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government has said anything publicly about these respective rescue missions. India-Pakistan relations are relatively calm at the moment, although recent Pakistani accusations that India staged a targeted assassination on Pakistani soil are a reminder that tensions are never far away.
To that end, the ship rescue missions are useful confidence-building measures for a relationship that can always benefit from a boost.
Former Indian Army chief M.M. Naravane, writing in the Print, rejects India’s recent decision to fence its border with Myanmar. “[W]e need to secure our borders against transnational threats. However, any proposal that alienates the local community will only further vitiate the already fragile law-and-order situation in border areas,” he argues.
In the Kathmandu Post, activist Mitra Pariyar decries the proliferation of pro-monarchy sentiment in Nepal. “The absence of a king is not the real problem; elected party leaders emulating the king’s attitudes and behaviours is the crux of our problem now,” he writes.
Retired Pakistani Brig. Raashid Wali Janjua calls for a revitalization of Pakistan’s “glorious tennis past.” Writing in the Express Tribune, he argues that the Pakistan Tennis Federation must be “fired up with the passion to usher in [a] sports renaissance staying well clear of player politics, favouritism and lethargy, the three cardinal sins of sports management.”