For seven months, former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif inhabited the Seventh Circle of Hell, where Dante Alighieri imagined thieves would be bitten by poisonous reptiles, their bodies turning into ash before regenerating for more torment. The prison cell inside Attock Fort, built by the Mughals to guard the Indus, was four feet by four with no windows. The only visitors were venomous snakes and scorpions. The door, Sharif later recalled, “would open just enough for me to see a man’s eye and part of his nose. I would ask for water and it would be pushed through.”
Last week, former PM Imran Khan began his own journey through Pakistan’s perdition machine, convicted — after a brief trial in which his lawyers did not offer a defence — of stealing gifts given to him as head of government. That particular crime, public records show, has also been committed by other prime ministers, presidents, and generals in Pakistan. They, however, aren’t in a jail cell with an open toilet overrun by flies and mosquitos.
Ever since former President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was carried to the gallows from his stinking cell in Rawalpindi’s now-razed prison, eviscerated by malaria, dysentery, and hunger strikes, the country’s politicians have known there’s a high price for defying the all-powerful military. His daughter and former PM Benazir Bhutto served extended periods in jail, including years without charge; her husband Asif Ali Zardari is alleged to have been tortured in prison; Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shehbaz Sharif suffered awful conditions.
Few countries have such a toxic political culture—and its existence holds out important lessons. Following its defeat by India in the 1971 war, the Pakistani military never truly recovered its legitimacy. To discipline and punish successful politicians who might challenge its primacy, it needs to use coercion to discipline and punish. This is an army that is weak, not an unchallenged hegemon.
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The Attock mutiny
The son of colonial Indian Police officer Bakht Yawar Ali, and the grandson to one-time kotwal of Amritsar Safdar Jung Khan, Brigadier Farrukh Bakht Ali was born into a middle-class family with roots in Patiala. After some years of schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Mussoorie, he joined his father’s alma mater, the Government College, Lahore. Even though the college discouraged political activism, Ali organised Muslim League activities on campus and considered joining the columns of irregulars headed to fight in Kashmir in 1947.
But in January 1948, he joined the first batch of the Pakistan Military Academy and was commissioned into artillery. He served for some months in Kashmir and then went for further studies at the School of Artillery at Larkhill in the United Kingdom.
Following the war of 1971, Ali wrote a letter of resignation from the Pakistan Army, assuming that military ruler General Yahya Khan would also step down. Ali had commanded the 6 Armoured Division, which fought in the Battle of Basantar. First hand, Ali was to recall in his memoirs, he watched incompetent commanders execute an ill-fated attempt to cut off Pathankot and Poonch, costing the opportunity to bargain them against territories lost in East Pakistan.
Like several other mid-level officers, Ali was enraged by Yahya’s efforts to hold on to power. Even though their dissent succeeded in forcing Yahya to resign, a ferocious power struggle broke out over his succession, with rival factions backing General Abdul Hamid and General Gul Hassan Khan. General Gul won but sparked fresh disputes by easing out three generals with a good military reputation — major generals Ehsan-ul-Haq Malik, Shaukat Raza, and Khadim Hussain Raj.
Famously carrying his service weapon at his side, Ali stormed into the office of Punjab Governor Ghulam Mustafa Khar and warned that General Gul was allowing war-tainted generals to continue in service. The incident led to Ali being forced to resign. Large numbers of young officers, though, were angered by the lack of accountability among the army leadership. Through 1971 and 1973, they attempted to persuade Ali to stage a coup.
The plotting ended with Ali’s conviction, at a court-martial convened by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq at Attock Fort. Together with him, several other officers were sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Faith and fear
Like the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi, scholar Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr notes, the Attock conspirators believed East Pakistan had been lost because of General Yahya’s un-Islamic ways. “This concern for Islamicity in the army was the result of the officer corps having opened its ranks to cadets from the lower-middle classes after 1965, which made it markedly more subject to the influence of traditional Islamic values,” Nasr argues. Following the 1971 defeat, the army’s junior leadership was turning to religion for solutions.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, military historian Hamid Husain records, pushed hard for the former President to be handed a death sentence—imagining it would crush Islamist dissent in the military. General Zia, hand-picked by the Prime Minister to lead the post-1971 Army, personally presided over the trial.
Led by Major Muzaffar Usmani, though, the trial court’s junior officers refused to comply with the army chief’s wishes. Ali was sentenced to life imprisonment. Zulfikar later amended the constitution to ensure Ali would remain in prison until his death.
Things didn’t quite work to plan, of course. General Zia turned on his master, who ended up just a few yards from Ali’s cell. Zia would bring in a programme of Islamisation that implemented the wishes of the ideologue Maududi, who inspired Ali and other coup plotters. For his part, Ali was released from prison by Zia in May 1978 and moved to Canada. There, Ali would help set up the province of Ontario’s disaster management system.
Muzaffar Usmani would later help General Pervez Musharraf overthrow Nawaz Sharif in 1999—and send him, a protégé of General Zia, to prison.
The struggle for power
Likely, Imran knew what prison would be like. Late in 2007, charged under anti-terrorism laws by Musharraf, Imran was bundled into a truck for a nine-hour journey to Dera Ghazi Khan. “The jail was dirty and crowded,” Imran later remembered, with 10 to 15 people crammed into each cell. “My own cell was in the hospital wing and had a little bed and filthy bathroom. But I had a room of my own. During the day I was allowed to sit outside. Although, at sunset, I was locked in my room for the night. I could hardly eat in jail since I had no exercise and the food was terrible…I made the mistake—if it ever happens again I would not do it the same way—of going on a complete hunger strike rather than just having liquids.”
Even though Imran is accused of having been impetuous and immature in pushing to influence army appointments, he isn’t the first to have sought power within the military. Following the Kargil war, Sharif had taken a bronze pip off the shoulder of his military secretary, Brigadier Javed Malik, so his newly-appointed army chief, Lieutenant-General Khwaja Ziauddin, could wear four on his shoulder. General Pervez Musharraf responded by staging a coup.
Zardari sought to use the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a tool to gain United States support for civilian supremacy over the army—preparing the ground for the downfall of his regime.
Imran’s efforts to keep a hand-picked Inter-Services Intelligence director, and appoint the next army chief, might have led to his downfall. But it shows that the question of the civil-military power game remains unfinished—and that the generals are playing with a weaker hand than most imagine.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)