No Country For Civilians

Nawaz Sharif’s unceremonious exit has once again exposed the fragility of Pakistan’s democracy and will severely limit India’s options to resolve bilateral issues through civilian diplomacy.

- Sandeep Unnithan

On July 27, just a day before Pakistan’s Supreme Court ejected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, India’s minister of state for external affairs General V.K. Singh (retired), while speaking in Parliament, listed four reasons that had set back bilateral ties between India and Pakistan—the Pathankot terror attack, cross-border terrorism, ceasefire violations by Pakistani forces and the death penalty handed down to alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav. Left unsaid was the common thread binding all four reasons—the Pakistan army.

India believes the Pakistan army runs ‘the infrastructure of terror’ that recruits and trains terrorists to carry out attacks—as in Pathankot and Uri in 2016—and provokes firing on the LoC to facilitate their infiltration. This deadly incendiary cocktail of factors and a Pakistani military court’s April 10 death sentence to Jadhav have scorched India-Pakistan ties.

In June, when PM Narendra Modi met Sharif at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Astana, Kazakhstan—their first meeting since December 2015—the two leaders were warm and cordial, enquired about each other’s families, but that was it. No formal meeting was scheduled and the two sat at separate tables.

Sharif ’s ouster, which many in the Indian establishment have been privately calling a ‘ judicial execution’ and ‘soft coup’, has reiterated an old axiom: in Pakistan, the military calls the shots and there is little civilian prime ministers can do. Not even Sharif, whose nine years in office make him the country’s longest serving PM, even though all his three tenures were cut short.