File photo. Rizwan Tabassum—AFP
Any sensible person would worry about the economy when the country goes downhill. Pakistan is desperately hanging on to conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the revival of a loan facility that only marginally takes into account how the people of Pakistan think about the economy. As the political battlefield is drawn today, you win momentarily if you ignore the economy, and lose if you seek the recommended tightening of the belt under the IMF; and are doomed forever if you think of the future and take the statistics of a dilapidated economy seriously. Just look at what happened: then-prime minister Imran Khan went to the IMF and pledged obedience to conditionalities and got the leeway the national economy desperately needed. Then he looked at his declining public support and decided otherwise with veteran economists like Shaukat Tarin advising him to kick the IMF. This has worked, as Khan hits the street with millions following and backing him for standing with the common man against the “imposed” IMF conditions that he himself signed onto.
This is a prescription for death. You are doing ok if you are not ruling and have the advantage of criticizing the difficult decisions needed to set the economy right by cutting off subsidies, which meant “spending on the people.” There is no money in the till and what you are spending and not “collecting” is simply causing the mountain of financial liabilities to mount that everyone outside Pakistan thinks will sink the state. This is the time when Imran Khan is out of the government after flouting the IMF and is asking for elections he expects to sweep. Hasn’t the common man suffered as the state kowtowed to the rascally IMF? Now the Shehbaz Sharif-led coalition has gone to the IMF after realizing that even the “friendly” states with money will shell out only after the IMF is in charge.
The government is becoming shaky, with the Sharif in London thinking like Imran Khan, asking P.M. Shehbaz to go to the polls. Even if not canny economy-wise, Nawaz Sharif knows that the shelter-less people of Pakistan in the four provinces only know that they are not getting food to eat. He is recommending going for elections even when he knows that Khan will steal the show. Even the tough-guy ministers like Rana Sanaullah are thinking that Shehbaz Sharif should give up following the IMF edicts and go for elections. What will happen? Khan will win and be right back once again looking at the empty till while friends like Turkiye’s Erdogan—the rich Arabs already disenchanted—are unable to give the dollars he will need to run an agricultural economy devastated by floods.
Pakistan is trapped in a situation from which there is no way out. If the economy could speak out, it would have said “keep Imran Khan away from me,” but he is popular with the people and has clandestine “institutional” support that doesn’t care for the IMF apart from thinking of it as a slave of the “bigger enemy.” What is ominous is the reduction of the state to a medieval satrapy refusing to realize the nature of the world it lives in.