Bilawal in India: A Minor Actor in Pakistan’s Military Script

By Mukesh Devrari

There is a lot of discussion around the Pakistani foreign minister’s visit to India, but no one is talking about it honestly. This visit must be looked at from two angles. The first is Pakistan’s domestic politics. Right now, it has three major players. First is the PTI led by Imran Khan. Second is the Pakistan Muslim League (N), which the former PM Nawaz Sharif controls. The third most crucial political outfit, the Pakistan People’s Party, is controlled by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s family. The PPP is almost like a family-run business with a strong base in Sindh.

Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan until he fell out of favor with the military and was removed from his position. Though the military did not intervene directly, it managed his ouster from behind the curtain. Since then, a sulking Imran Khan has tried to project his confrontation with the military as a personal feud between himself and former Army Chief General Bajwa for the public’s consumption, as he understands the limitations of challenging the existing power structure in Pakistan.

Still, it would be fair to say that after a long time, Pakistan truly has a civilian leader who is able to challenge the military's dominance. The roots of military supremacy in governing the country are so deep that Imran Khan is not fighting to uphold civilian supremacy or any other high democratic moral, which is essential to building a basic electoral democracy. In his public discourses, he merely presents his confrontation with the ruling dispensation as a personal discord with a few generals who are behind dislodging his government and installing the PPP and PML(N) government—rather than describing his struggle against the armed forces as a fight to attain the basic tenet of democracy, where the power to govern the nation belongs to the elected leadership. He is basically requesting the generals to support him, as they have done previously.

So far, IK has openly accused an army general of making two assassination attempts on his life but without directly naming Army Chief Bajwa. In one of the attacks, a bullet hit him in the foot, but he survived. It is also widely believed that the Pakistan army was behind the assassination of former PM Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and also hanged former PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a sham trial. In short, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Bilawal Zardari’s political outfits have no ground support. IK is demanding immediate elections, while this Sharif-Zardari gang wants elections to be postponed until they see the popularity of IK dipping to an extent that they can muster the courage to face him on the electoral battlefield. As per the local media coverage, IK's popularity is unmatched, and he would win any election.

It is important to note that Pakistani politics has two pillars. The first is the ideology of Pakistan, meaning Islam or Islamism. The second is the Kashmir issue, which flows from the ideology of Pakistan—that all Muslim-majority regions of India rightfully belong to Pakistan. Pakistani politicians compete to prove their Islamic credentials and their support for the official Pakistani position that Kashmir must be seized from India. During his tenure, Imran Khan ticked both boxes. He was using Islamic imagery and promising to convert Pakistan into 7th-century Medina.

Imran Khan also launched an international campaign against India and tried to demonize the Indian government as a fascist Hindu government. His rants were not limited to the Kashmir issue. He even had the audacity to lecture Western countries about preserving the rights of their Muslim population. He used the word Islamophobia to describe Western approaches to Muslims and Muslim nations. His speeches at the UN captured the attention of Muslims around the globe, and undoubtedly, if he had stayed in power, he could have emerged as the third most recognized Muslim leader after Turkish PM Erdogan and Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. It is also interesting to note that in his book Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington mentions Pakistan while outlining his thesis of cultural and religious clashes between Islamic societies and the Western world, along with four other Muslim nations.

Indians are more than happy that Imran Khan has been disposed of by the Pakistani military. Though the Modi government firmly dealt with IK, as he backed terror attacks in Kashmir and justified them, PM Modi did not treat him as more than a nuisance whose hyperbolic rants could be ignored. It is highly likely that Modi also threatened Pakistan to release a captured Indian pilot in 2019, which is why Pakistan was extremely keen to release him immediately. In the years to come, we will know the truth about what transpired behind closed doors between the two countries.

In other words, a weak politician like Bilawal Zardari-Bhutto, who uses his mother’s surname only to keep his family's political career alive, cannot afford to be any different. He will make routine Pakistani arguments in Goa. India can easily ignore him, as we have ignored previous generations of Pakistani ruling elites for making similar statements. The essence will be the same, but the words might be different. And the second angle is that the Indian government would not like any Pakistani to mention the K-word while in India. Nawaz Sharif is quite popular among Indians as he did exactly that a few years back.

As long as Modi maintains the courage to retaliate against terrorist attacks, as he did after Pulwama, India is in safe hands. The forces inimical to India who supply weapons and training to terrorists must have some fear; otherwise, in no time, Mumbai-style attacks will be repeated in India. Bilawal, the 34-year-old political dynast from Pakistan, must not be given unnecessary importance that he does not deserve. If Modi wants to build bilateral relations with Pakistan, then he should talk directly to the Pakistani military, as he did to implement a ceasefire at the LOC in 2021. We must also note that at the SCO summit, India’s foreign minister Jaishankar didn’t even shake hands with Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. After abusing Modi and making personal attacks on him, Bilawal can't expect to be welcomed by the Indian government.