Death of idealism?

Legal eye
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
“A week is a long time in politics”, former British prime minister Harold Wilson once said. Who knows what the next rounds of local government elections might bring. But the first one in Punjab was gruesome for the PTI.
At present is it possible to analyse the duel between the PML-N and PTI in Punjab as anything other than one between an incumbent and a challenger? Are there significant differences in what the parties stand for? Will the PTI still be seen as the party of idealism and change in 2018 that it branded itself as back in 2011?
The year 2007 was a time of idealistic politics: a dictatorship was to be fought; meltdown of constitutionalism was to be prevented; rule of law and democracy were to be entrenched. Centre-province, civil-military and extremist-progressive were the three critical socio-structural fault-lines. But it was the season of expanded idealism. Notwithstanding Musharraf, Fazlullah’s reign of terror in Swat and Lal Masjid vigilantes, talk of revolution didn’t sound pretentious then, Habib Jalib had came back to life, and many thought they could be the change they wanted.
On the structural fault-lines, there has been some progress. Representative democracy did return in 2008, in considerably uncontrolled form, and Musharraf was ousted. With the restoration of judges the fallen did rise as had never happened before and PCO and doctrine of necessity became swear words. The judiciary, executive and legislature became functional in a meaningful sense. The 18th Amendment did devolve real power to the federating units and improved the centre-province imbalance by loosening the centre’s stranglehold.
On the extremist-progressive divide, while there was timidity exhibited by all between 2008 and 2014, there slowly emerged a consensus that the idea of Pakistan’s sovereignty isn’t compatible with ceding territory to Fazlullahs, the TTP and the like. Swat was wrestled back and operations were launched in Fata without overall clarity that talk-fight-talk-fight won’t work. It wasn’t until after Raheel Sharif found his feet and APS happened that a consensus against terror and religious extremism was forced by khakis with the politicos acquiescing.
Thus the extremist-progressive imbalance has improved while the civil-military imbalance has grown further. But on both issues there are no differences in the approach of our mainstream parties. In the aftermath of Hakeemullah’s death when the issue of striking deals with TTP emerged in parliament, everyone joined the chorus of “peace with our bretheren”. Likewise, civil-military imbalance is simply not an issue in our politics and there exist no competing visions to promote civilian control of military. The fight is for being more loyal than the king.
For the lawyers’ movement (which was in part a movement for democracy) the groundswell of support came from the urban middle class that saw the twin values of democracy and rule of law as catalysts for improvement of their lives as well as Pakistan’s future. With judges restored and CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry’s focus on the NRO, corruption scandals and lack of accountability, traditional politics of patronage and corruption captured public imagination. In the political realm, Imran Khan emerged as the crusader against these vices and flag bearer for change.
With the dictator gone, democracy restored and an assertive Supreme Court exposing the power elite and its self-serving ways, space opened up for an agent of change to emerge from within the political realm and cleanse the system. The same disgruntled and vocal middle class, itching for transformative change that imagined it would be ushered in by an independent judiciary under an activist chief justice, started looking for a new messiah to emerge, an outsider who could gatecrash the political system and then shake it up. Imran Khan fit the bill.
At the end of 2011 floodgates of support opened up. The PTI rallies were magical. They brought out to the street the reasonably affluent urban class that has previously seen politics as dirty business. Pakistan in its recent past had not seen the diversity of class and gender that the huge PTI gatherings attracted. With Pakistan’s flags tattooed and all the song and dance, the glint of hope in the eyes of PTI supporters was unmistakable. The support augmented and in 2013 the PTI emerged as the second largest national party.
Whether due to over-ambition or miscalculated projections, the PTI leadership dubbed this success of emerging as the runner-up and shadow government as a failure. The PTI’s optimism was replaced with agitation politics of the non-constructive variety. The hope of 2011-12 was transformed into angst and cynicism in 2013, which finally degenerated into anger and imagined conspiracies with the dharna debacle and its aftermath.
While dharna politics entrenched the PTI as the challenger in Punjab, it also pushed away many of the party’s thinking supporters for two reasons. One, it strengthened the impression that Imran was in a hurry to seize power, which was a no-holds-barred project in which the end justified the means no matter how questionable. Two, it projected the PTI as a destructive force, true to its love for tsunamis, demonising all national institutions (and individuals opposed to it) as evil and sold-out and systems as abusive and redundant without proposing constructive alternatives.
Between 2013 and 2015, while the PTI’s fit of rage continued, there was little talk of how it would solve the problems afflicting Pakistan and its people if the party was stumbled into power at the center. With the PTI in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and it being debatable which is better amongst two inadequate systems of governance – KP or Punjab – the PTI is no longer strictly an outsider capable of making miracles happen. Consequently, its appeal as an agent of transformative change in 2015 is not what it was back in 2011-12.
The PTI started as the movement for justice. Where is the party’s programme for fixing our broken justice system and why has it not been implemented in KP so far? Does the PTI have a comprehensive policy on educating the 28 million out of schools kids in Pakistan and creating jobs for their upward social mobility? What does the PTI plan to do about our population explosion? Why have we seen no legislative initiatives that address the emerging water crisis? Why do Imran and the PTI leadership not use the bully pulpit to make these the debated political issues in Pakistan?
There is one measure for IK and another for judging other politicos because IK offered himself as the agent of change standing on a higher pedestal and claiming to be the leader who would rise above existing dismal standards. If KPK under PTI does no better (or only marginally better) than Punjab, the lack of distinction hurts PTI and not PML-N or other traditional parties. With no appealing plans for the poor, laborers and youth, no strategy for effective institutional reform and a menagerie of ‘electables’ collected from all over, what will PTI stand for in 2018?
Pakistan has also changed over the last eight years. The year 2007 saw the peak of idealism that came along with great urge for transformative change. As the big socio-structural changes ensued, the idealism began to recede and be replaced with realism. The revolutionary zeal also subsided and what sunk in was that sustainable change will be incremental and not drastic.
In a Pakistan defined by realism and transitional change, how will the PTI package itself for 2018, reignite its plateaued appeal and expand it from urban to rural Pakistan where elections are won and lost?
The urge for change, especially in the urban middle class, had been simmering for a while. With the PTI’s misconceived dharna politics it boiled over. It is now time for the PTI to get back to the drawing board. Does Imran have the ability to introspect and the spunk to transform anger back into hope?
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu