The madness at ‘Azadi Square’

In an ever-increasing state of polarisation, people will dispense with reason, faster and faster. In the vacuum left behind, people converge to type, and employ blankets of convenience.
Being a critic or sceptic of the egomaniacal Imran Khan is not the same thing as being a supporter of the sullen and disengaged prime minister. Questioning how immature political invective about wet shalwars and dry humping can help reduce the ambient level of corruption is not the same thing as being a supporter of crony and corrupt capitalism. You don’t need to be a PTI supporter to be a sincere aspirant for a changed and reformed Pakistani state. You don’t need to be a PML-N supporter to approve of megaprojects and infrastructure investment.
The world is not black and white. If you are too thick to understand this, then we can all blame Facebook and Twitter, because really, the only reason you have any voice or agency is the disturbing democratisation of stupidity that social media has blessed us with.
One old friend was certain that the only reason I wasn’t with the PTI was because I didn’t ever have any problems with the way Pakistani works, or doesn’t work. We had an intense, profanity-laced exchange that led to some improved understanding of each others’ positions. One cannot invest the same energy into every citizen of Insafville. If we could, Mr Khan would be left with no one to charge up at his jalsas.
Khan is a scourge upon the youth of Pakistan and their potential to change this country. He has created a whimsical and false narrative of change and improvement that will not be and cannot be delivered. And very little among his actual support base can be truly revolutionary, because the vast majority of them, very much like you and I, are invested in the very system that he wants to take down.
PTI supporters claim Khan is working within the constitution and within the system and that it is Tahirul Qadri that is the anti-system guy. He may say he is working within the system, but he has labelled every institution and every individual not siding with him to be of questionable integrity. The problem is, there are a lot of people not siding with him. The truth is that Khan is provoking a long-term bitterness with the state of Pakistan that will not easily be fixed.
Why is the change that the Kaptaan promises impossible?
The biggest reason is rather simple. Societies don’t change top-down, unless one is invested in some heavy bloodshed. Societies change from the bottom-up. This is why the Turkish economic transformation and associated Ottoman political awakening is more sustainable than Malaysia’s truly impressive political gains, driven not by grassroots enterprise or ingenuity, but by assiduous and dictatorial public policy over the course of about three decades.
Either way, the ground is ripe in Pakistan for neither. We are too diverse and unruly to be lead for 25 years by a desi Lee Kwan Yu. Right-wing Indians are discovering this very quickly as Prime Minister Modi discovers the ins and outs of New Delhi. Centrist Delhiites discovered this when they mistakenly elected Arvind Kejriwal to office. We are smarter. We didn’t make such mistakes in the 2013 election.
Making speeches that get the blood flowing is easy. Especially in the age of Twitter. Gosh, if only every psycho at Hyde Park had two million twitter followers! What a glorious cacophony of revolution it would be that would spread across the lands!
Real change is impossibly difficult, and produced through an interconnected galaxy of compromises between the ideal best way, and the way that is good enough, with lots of warts.
The best example of this was the pragmatism Imran Khan demonstrated after the election. Chief Minister Pervez Khattak is no Insafian. A wily old politician who has been a jiyala, a Sherpaoist and now an Imranist, Khattak knows how to get to the place where he takes oath of office. He didn’t get there making speeches at Hyde Park. He got there because he knows how to run a campaign for MPA – five wins in five tries, I believe. He got there because he knows how to make deals – three ministerial terms and now chief minister.
Most of all, he got there because he makes sure important chairs are occupied by people loyal to him. At least half a dozen close family members occupy seats in the assemblies and close to the centre of power in Peshawar. Is Khattak a villain or a hero?
I don’t think he is either. He is a really successful politician. More successful than Jahangir Tareen, or Shireen Mazari, or even my dear friend Shafqat Mehmood. Of course, Insafians, quite in spite of themselves, will be uncomfortable with this. They don’t like Khattak very much. And why should they?
Insafians are being brainwashed by their leader to believe that a divinely guided angel from the skies has descended upon them. He, and only he, can save Pakistan. He is pure and perfect and pristine, and his name is Imran Khan. Khattak is just an inconvenient footnote, Insafians hope and pray.
The truth is that the one truly transformational impact the PTI is having and can have is to convert people like Khattak from vessels of pure self-interest, into vessels of self-interest that deliver better governance. So actually, Khattak is great for Pakistan, especially as he works within a larger framework of the PTI’s oft-promised reforms.
So what of those reforms? I have worked personally with the PTI’s education minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a brilliant, bold and refreshing Pakistani politician named Atif Khan. Atif is a new politician. Very different from Khattak. He doesn’t mince words and he doesn’t lie. He’s a breath of fresh air. If Atif remained minister for a decade, I think he could transform education in KP.
But Atif cannot do this alone, and he cannot deliver it over night. My favourite Atif Khan story is a television interview in which I was a co-guest. I had provided the interviewer with a lot of data on how bad the state of education is in KP. The interviewer took the data and threw it at the minister. The Minister, without batting an eyelid, turned around and provided more proof of how bad things were. And then he said, he is working on fixing it.
Of course, for the last two weeks, Atif isn’t doing anything remotely related to fixing education. He is hostage, just like the rest of the country, to the ego of an individual who has wrongly become convinced of his infallibility and his destiny as prime minister.
Pakistan needs change, and it needs it bad. The 2013 election wasn’t perfect, but it did give us Atif Khan as education minister in KP, and Dr Arif Alvi as MNA for NA-250. Either the election was fair, or it wasn’t. Imran Khan wants cake; he wants to eat the cake. And he wants everyone else to digest it. Meanwhile, one of the great opportunities in Pakistani history, to change the fate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is going a-begging. This isn’t tabdeeli. It is madness.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.