This reviewer went to several well-known and well-stocked bookshops but could not find a copy of Fallout: Power, Intrigue and Political Upheaval in Pakistan. More shockingly, there are hardly any non-fiction books or fiction, for that matter, on Pakistan to be found. And Pakistan’s literary fiction, some claim, is superior to India’s. Then I realised that one hardly reads about Pakistan in the newspapers either; there is the same brain-dead parroting by the usual right-wing foghorns, but no update on our largest neighbour, from whom we are actually “separated-at-birth”. It all no doubt has to do with the government and its policy of deep-freezing relations with Pakistan.
The book is a collection of columns by Salman Masood, a correspondent for The New York Times since 2003 and editor of The Nation since 2020. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
When I did get this book, I was fascinated. The book is a recapping of Pakistan’s past decade with a focus on the civil-military power struggle as manifested through the former international cricket celebrity Imran Khan. It is a collection of columns by Salman Masood, a correspondent for The New York Times since 2003 and editor of The Nation since 2020. It throws one into the thick of things without warning or explanation or background of the dramatis personae. This is initially disorienting even for a news junkie but is a gift in the sense that one is immediately and easily carried down the white waters of a fast-moving narrative river.
Before I began reading, I thought: what a cop-out to take your columns and lazily slap them together into a collection. Only big bores do that. However, by the time I finished Fallout, I had to doff my cap to Masood and marvel at how well his collection came together into a telling and flowing narrative of the past decade.
Fallout
Power, Intrigue and Political Upheaval in Pakistan
Penguin Random House India, 2024
Pages: 256
Price: Rs.599
It works because (a) it is never boring; (b) instead of being a comprehensive academic study of an institution like the army or the free fall of the Pakistan economy, it is a broad overview of “The Project”, which Masood claims was the army’s design to bring Khan to power, and its ultimate souring; (c) it focusses on two main players, Khan and the army chief from 2016 to 2022, General Qamar Javed Bajwa; (d) the 59 chapters, each being column-length (700-1,000 words, presumably), are easy to read and take a break from; (e) Masood writes well, better than most Indian columnists, and that is perhaps a tradition passed down from the martial law days under General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88), when journalists had to tell one something without saying it outright.
A struggle from the start
It is not difficult to decode what is going on in Pakistan: it has been from the start a struggle for supremacy between the military and the political class, and it never ends well for the civilians because, well, the military sooner or later realises that it does not want to, or cannot, let go of power no matter how much it would like to. All one really needs is a fine episodic recount of events written with a cynical eye, and thus Masood’s Fallout is somewhat like Chronicle of a Death Foretold, in this case the recurring death of democracy. Reading about this political implosion is like watching a car crash in slow motion.
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In the book, The Project starts in 2011—although Khan has been hanging around on the periphery of politics since 1996, having garnered an iconic status for himself through a brilliant test career in the 1980s and having captained the World Cup-winning team in 1992 and cementing his status by building the country’s first cancer hospital—but gains momentum only in 2014, which is where Fallout begins. Nawaz Sharif is Prime Minister, yet again, and the army is sick of him and his businessmen pals. It is also sick of former President Asif Zardari, the wily widower of Benazir Bhutto, and it seems the general public is also sick of these dynasts who cannot solve Pakistan’s problems.
The main problem: the economy
The main problem is the economy. The military does not want to take ownership of a problem that is too difficult for fauji (martial) minds to tackle. The “Panama Papers” (remember them?) come to the rescue and Sharif has to go. Khan, thus, is the new, squeaky-clean saviour.
General Bajwa repeatedly talks about letting civilians take primacy in politics. But things are not so easy; the army already has its fingers in a lot of pies in the civilian economy, and retired generals expect the same sinecures that their seniors enjoyed. The Pakistan Army in the economy is like the US Army in a Muslim country: unable to withdraw.
Then there is Khan himself. Although he finally reaches power on the back of adulating masses from small towns, he and his team are equally clueless about how to fix the economy (aside from the World Bank’s politically unpalatable prescriptions, like hiking electricity tariffs). Failing at governance, Khan switches over to strongman-mode, spouting religious nationalism and economic populism. It is not hard, after all everyone in the world is doing it, whether it is next door in Narendra Modi’s India or across the planet in Donald Trump’s America.
Populists, however, need an enemy. For Khan, it becomes the US. It is a convincing enemy, given how much of a fair-weather friend it has been to Pakistan, be it after the withdrawal of the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from Afghanistan in 1989 or its own withdrawal in 2023. China has been a more reliable friend, even if a more usurious one (in view of its management of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, in which Pakistani infrastructure is built with Chinese loans at high interest rates and by employing only Chinese infrastructure companies). It is not difficult, then, to convince your supporters that the US is the great Satan.
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Side by side, Khan tries to wrangle some power back from Bajwa and gang, a fool’s errand. It is telling that in April 2022, Khan refused to heed the US call to cancel a trip to Russia (which invaded Ukraine in February that year) and, in that same month, lost a no-confidence motion and was removed as Prime Minister.
A month later, however, the Lahore Corps commander’s house was attacked by Khan’s supporters and burnt to the ground. The army, in its infinite wisdom, court-martials the corps commander.
Khan is thrown into jail on some pretty unconvincing charges, and an election is held without him. Oddly, the authorities not only ban his party and take away its election symbol but also ban the Internet on the day of polling. And still, his band of Independents are far larger than the other parties. Buoyed by his success, Khan refuses to share power and stays in jail, and that is where the narrative comes to a halt, though the story is far from over. One should probably expect a few more corps commanders to be slapped around. This is where the downward spiral of civil-military relations in Pakistan has brought us.
Masood writes wryly and concisely, distilling all the nuance of a live political situation into a postmodern comedy. There is an anecdote about a lower-rung politician’s run-in with the army; we in India do not hear much about lower-rung politicians unless they rape or run over someone.
I only wish I could get my hands on more books like Fallout.
Aditya Sinha is a journalist and author living in Gurugram.
