Something’s hidden in the Oval Office photo of Trump, Munir, Sharif. India must look closely

What Munir has achieved with Trump is a return to normal, ironing out the post-Abbottabad crease. The White House picture gives us insight into how Pakistan survives, occasionally thrives and thinks.

Illustration: Manali Ghosh/ThePrint

Donald Trump in the middle, flanked by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to his right and Field Marshal Asim Munir to his left is the most defining geopolitical image for us in India. As one who sees the world often through the prism of old Indian film music, this might make me instinctively start humming ‘duniya badal gayi, meri duniya badal gayi…’ (the world has changed, see how my world has changed) from the 1950 Dilip Kumar-Nargis-Munawar Sultana classic Babul.

The reason I won’t do so, or even commend it to you isn’t just because Shakeel Badayuni’s poetry then took you into a world of self-pitying melancholy and heartbreak. Geopolitics, particularly when it comes to powers as consequential as India and the US, are more complex than the usual Bollywood love triangle. There are many factors at play. One, the US relationship with Pakistan is older and formally tighter than with India. While the US might have cooled off on Pakistan after finding and killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, the organic relationship remained.

The US never dropped Pakistan from the list of Major Non-NATO allies. India never got on to it, nor would it ever be an applicant for it.

While the US under any president will value India for its size, stature, growth, stability and rising comprehensive national power (CNP), it knows India will never be what the sole superpower always needs: a client state. Pakistan has been one since 1954, when it signed on to US-led SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). To that extent, what Munir has achieved with Trump is a return to that normal, ironing out the post-Abbottabad crease. That’s why that ‘duniya badal gayi…’ metaphor doesn’t apply.

Further, in the Subcontinent, another expression has gained strategic currency lately: new normal. What this picture represents is actually the return of the old normal in the US view on the Subcontinent. In 2016, Prime Minister Modi had talked about diplomatically isolating Pakistan. At this point, that project is in abeyance.

If we, in India, shake off this immediate disappointment and start thinking like grown-ups again, this picture will give us a much better insight into how Pakistan survives, occasionally thrives, and thinks.

The fact is, another Pakistani army chief visited the White House with his prime minister not long ago. It was General Qamar Javed Bajwa with Imran Khan in July, 2019. But then, it was clear that the prime minister was in front and the chief sat back. Now, the elected prime minister cannot even go for an official foreign visit without the field marshal sitting alongside. We saw this in Tianjin, Riyadh and Doha. This return to status quo, only being emphasised more visually, proves many of us Pakistan-watchers for decades wrong.

I was wrong, therefore, when writing on Munir’s ‘fifth star’ in this column. I harked back on Nawaz Sharif’s old argument that Pakistan had to choose between being a partridge or a quail (teetar or bater) as in being governed by the army or an elected government. You can’t have a bit of this and a bit of that, he had said bravely in 1993 as he took the train back to Lahore from Rawalpindi after being summarily fired by the establishment despite his large majority. The picture of the trio in the White House tells you three things.

● One, this is the ‘system’ in Pakistan—the army in control, with a subservient prime minister it would get ‘elected’. In the past, military dictators have experimented with getting party-less prime ministers elected in fixed elections. Think Zia and Junejo, Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz. Even Ayub and Yahya had Bhutto function as their civilian face.

● Two, that Nawaz Sharif was brave, but virtuously delusional in hoping that one day, after many trials, Pakistani democracy would take over the country as much as India’s. He also saw a normalisation with India as key to this. He is now in the saddest phase of his life, mourning his dead project, whatever the riches of his Mar-a-Lago-sized home in Raiwind, near Lahore. The fact that his brother is now the prime minister and daughter the chief minister of Punjab, where 60 percent of Pakistanis live, only adds to his humiliation and heartbreak. As melancholy as Bahadur Shah Zafar in Rangoon.

● And third, some of the understandings of many supposed Pakistan experts, this writer included, have been rendered erroneous, even stupid. That’s a confession. In that column on Munir’s fifth star, I had said Nawaz Sharif asked the partridge-versus-quail question but what Munir had conjured up was an entirely unique creature where nobody knew who had the power or the credibility within Pakistan. I had described this more as a curiosity, like a duck-billed platypus, and the inevitability of extinction facing it. This picture shows I misread the reality. Or how Pakistan thinks.

To understand how Pakistan thinks, ask yourself how come its people keep electing leaders, sometimes with big majorities, and then not only accept the generals firing them, but welcome it. The nation, its ideology and its sense of being and national pride are pre-designed for military autocracies. Pakistanis don’t feel secure under leaders they elect. They even sit at home when the most popular one is jailed.

We’ve seen the cycle of the army losing its popularity, facing street protests, and yet dramatically recovering and coming back on top. It uses a simple ploy. Just ratchet up a warlike situation with India and the people will ask who else will protect them but the army.

Like spark a 26/11 in 2008, and Pahalgam now. At each juncture the Pakistan Army’s reputation was in dumps. Just a whiff of threat from India restored what isn’t the old or new normal, but an eternal reality.

Next, please note that almost every elected leader in Pakistan has made at least one effort to seek peace with India. Nawaz had the broadest vision here but the Bhuttos also tried. One of their motivations was that it would help them throw the yoke of the big boys of the GHQ.

That’s precisely the reason each one was dismissed, exiled, jailed, and one even assassinated in anticipation of her return. It isn’t about Munir, Musharraf, Zia or Ayub. This army as an institution cannot afford peace with India. It cannot win wars, but at least a permanent insecurity keeps it in power. Even the chiefs who saw value in peace, Bajwa being the latest example, were disowned and reviled by the institution.

Munir is just more extreme and uncluttered than the rest. After Zia he’s the second true Islamist, a Hafiz Quran (one who’s memorised the holy book) who peppers his speeches with verses in Arabic. His total belief in the scriptures as he’s read them also convinces him of the inevitability of India breaking up. Either by what he sees as its own contradictions or through his slow-burn version of Ghazwa-e-Hind, using terrorist proxies and Chinese military power to keep gaming India’s responses and throwing it off focus.

India is now dealing with a true believer in its destruction in his lifetime. He’s got China with him, is wowing the Arabs with the offer to rent them the only army in the Islamic world that’s capable of fighting, absorbing modern technology and following its orders. He personifies what Pakistan thinks, only more starkly than his predecessors. Take it from me, Pakistan will sign some equivalent of the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel much before it ever makes peace with India. That’s India’s challenge. The Great Destabilizer in the White House adds to our degree of difficulty.