KP Governor's Rule: An emergency in the street and state

Back in 2024, the political future of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and perhaps of Pakistan itself, looked like a coin toss. There were two broad possibilities. One was a grand political settlement, perhaps involving a period of exile for Imran Khan, with the United Kingdom replacing Saudi Arabia as the preferred destination. The other was the eventual termination of the last PTI provincial government through constitutional intervention. One of these possibilities has now materialised.

There was a third option but this was not the 1990s when you could break a party with defections as its leader served time. No, political loyalties have not surged since, we just have tighter rules for turncoats. This gambit would not have worked in KP anyway. Floor crossing can’t be engineered when there has been a landslide.

What we did not know back then was how the PTI government in KP could be dislodged when push came to shove. Indeed, only one of these options has come to pass two years later. The federal government has declared an emergency and Governor’s Rule. There are reports that Chief Minister Sohail Afridi has been arrested. The justification is a law-and-order situation, terrorism and the breakdown in negotiations with the government.

The constitutional justification for federal intervention must be distinguished from its political rationale. Articles 232 and 234 provide extraordinary powers in different circumstances, and their invocation is subject to procedural requirements and limitations. A deterioration in security is an important consideration, but it does not automatically establish that constitutional government has become impossible.

There is also the question of consistency. Balochistan, immediately south and southwest of KP, has experienced its own severe deterioration in security since the 2024 elections. The two provinces face different insurgencies and different political circumstances, but the comparison is unavoidable. If terrorism alone establishes the necessity for extraordinary intervention, why is the constitutional response different in Balochistan?

This does not mean the security challenges in KP are imaginary, or that the provincial government bears no responsibility for its response. It means that the justification for governor’s rule must explain something more specific than the existence of terrorism. It must establish why the existing constitutional machinery could no longer deal with it.

There is, however, another security crisis that helps explain the political context of this decision. It began in 2023, and its protagonists were not militants.

May 9 remains consequential for Pakistan’s establishment in ways that subsequent and more lethal security incidents have not been. The attacks on military installations following Imran Khan’s arrest challenged assumptions about the relationship between the military and sections of the public that had traditionally been regarded as politically sympathetic to it.

Since the Arab Spring began in 2010, Pakistan’s security establishment had reason to contemplate the possibility that mass mobilisation might produce consequences beyond the capacity of conventional political management. Pakistan had different institutions, a different political history and a military with a different relationship to the state, especially compared to say Egypt. The spectacle of governments losing control of public spaces, and sometimes their own institutions, had become part of the political imagination of the region.

May 9 tested a version of that fear. The subsequent response suggested that the state possessed a greater capacity to suppress political mobilisation than PTI had anticipated. Arrests, prosecutions, restrictions on political activity and the disruption of party organisation altered the costs of confrontation. A serious underestimation had come to pass.

The implications were particularly significant in Punjab. Although the May 9 incidents were concentrated in several parts of Punjab and KP, the attacks in Lahore carried considerable symbolic weight. A city long associated with the military’s institutional presence and political influence had witnessed an extraordinary breach.

The state’s subsequent response changed the political environment in Punjab. Whatever the underlying level of support for PTI, public participation in confrontational politics became a much more consequential personal decision. The rules of political mobilisation had changed.

Against this background, PTI’s victory in KP in February 2024 was an enormous morale booster. Despite the imprisonment of Imran Khan, the loss of its electoral symbol and substantial impediments to electioneering, the party demonstrated that its electoral appeal remained formidable. KP supplied PTI with something it had lost elsewhere: an elected government, an institutional base and a territory from which to organise its politics, but it also inherited the unresolved strategic problem of May 9.

If there was uncertainty about PTI’s intended response, its choice of chief minister provided an early indication. Ali Amin Gandapur was a combative political figure, selected at a time when the party wanted to confront the federal government and demonstrate that its capacity for street mobilisation had survived. The threat of protest was that it would halt the business of the state.

He attempted to deliver on that expectation. In October and November 2024, PTI organised major efforts to reach Islamabad’s D-Chowk, the second involving Bushra Bibi. Both ended in retreats, and the November confrontation involved casualties, injuries and a disputed account of the security operation: however, the consequences went beyond the failure to occupy a public square.

For the federal government, the confrontations demonstrated that the capital could be defended against a determined political mobilisation. For PTI, they exposed the distance between the ability to assemble supporters and the ability to sustain a........

© Dawn Prism