Who won the dharna?

Imran Khan has a secret weapon. He has been using it since the first day of his Islamabad dharna at D-Chowk. This secret weapon has a name. We will get to its name in a second.
More important than the name of Imran Khan’s secret weapon is what this weapon can do. As long as he is using this secret weapon, Imran Khan will look like a saviour to a sizeable portion of young Pakistanis, female Pakistanis and urban Pakistanis. As the three fastest growing segments of the Pakistani voting population, it is no wonder the PPP and the PML-N governments keep dragging their feet on a census. A census would make Imran Khan even stronger, but the census is not his secret weapon.
The secret weapon is so potent that it has allowed Khan to straddle containers for over one hundred days, mostly managing to keep the cameras fixed on him. There will be the occasional yelp of the PPP or the Jamaat-e-Islami, “Hey look everybody, we too, do exist!” This desperation for existential affirmation however looks positively weak when compared to the events Imran Khan has been organising all around the country. When PPP jiyalas start hurling abuses at the PTI about being backed by ‘feudals’ then you know there’s something special going on.
The PTI pinch is bigger and wider than D-Chowk. The best demonstrations of this were in Larkana on the 21st of November, and in Gujranwala on the 23rd. You don’t just walk into Larkana or Gujranwala and raise a crowd of thousands because you’re ill-mannered and appeal to angry people. The inspiration and driver behind Imran Khan’s success is deeper and wider. It is rooted in one place in particular. That place? You guessed it. It is Imran Khan’s secret weapon.
Why are people interested in what Khan keeps saying? After all, there is nothing new he has said in the last couple of years, is there? “They’re corrupt, I’m clean”. “They don’t care, I do”. “They are all fake-nice, fake-polite, fake-everything. I’m real nasty (at least to them), I’m real, I’m real, I’m real”. From that legendary October 2011 jalsa to today, it is over three years. The speeches are the same, the delivery is the same, and even though the faces on the containers keep changing, really, they’re all the same. Can anyone tell the difference between the JKTs and the SMQs and the SRAs anymore?
How has Khan gone from no seats, and no chance, to more than thirty, with rocking jalsa after jalsa, and the PTI brand adorning every nanosecond of prime time television in the country? How did this man, whom I labelled “the world’s oldest teenager” in a different publication, manage to put a sharp dagger into the political status quo? What changed? Is ‘tabdeeli’ really here?
No. It really, really isn’t. But, yes, you guessed it. He’s using that ‘secret weapon’.
What is this secret weapon? Again, forget what we call it, but let’s focus on what it does. It makes Imran Khan seem bigger, stronger, more capable than anybody else. It makes the angry young men and women who support Imran Khan even angrier. It zaps them of hope and of agency. It makes them believe that unless they go out there and help Khan with their presence, with their voices, with their bare hands if they need to, they will not have a chance at living in a better Pakistan than the one they were born in, or the one they live in today.
The secret weapon does something that Khan could never do himself. The secret weapon affirms the impotence of government, and the incapability of government to change our perception of ourselves. The secret weapon makes it okay for Imran Khan to say irresponsible and silly things as he straddles containers across the country, hurling invective of whatever kind he chooses at whomever he pleases. The secret weapon is the proof of Imran Khan’s pudding. It is the ying to Imran Khan’s yang. It is the bing to Imran Khan’s badda-. It is the ching, to Imran Khan’s ka-. What is this irresistible secret weapon that Imran Khan is using? It is Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Nawaz Sharif is a glacier. He is the GHQ. A veritable behemoth. This is both a compliment and a criticism. He is the thing that is very big, very immoveable, and very powerful. Prime minister three times. This isn’t Abba Ji’s boy. The man is an institution. He is the thing that makes it seem like one million more dharnas won’t be able to budge the structural inadequacies of English-style bicameral parliamentary ‘democracy’ (sic).
It is because of his political acumen and his heft in Pakistani politics that he keeps surviving. Is he unbelievably lucky? Without doubt. Would he cast a smaller, more manageable shadow if Mohtarma was still alive? Almost assuredly so. Still, he is the most easily and most frequently underestimated politician in the country.
These very qualities are a gift for the Sharif brand of politics: “Disburse patronage intelligently, across enough places”. “Don’t leave yourself vulnerable to the Chaudhrys or their ilk”. “Invest in the right bureaucrats”. “Build, build, build”. Add all of it together, and the Sharifs were supposed to be unstoppable in Punjab for two generations.
In struts the Kaptaan and turns the equation on its head. And what does he use as his principal instrument? That very thing – the quiet, unassuming, almost clumsy confidence of Nawaz Sharif. This confidence may sustain the House of Ittefaq in the seat of power through 2018, but it is also the perpetually renewable fossil fuel of Imran Khan’s appeal. Two very important constituencies in particular are sick and tired of the Pakistan in which Sharif can be an unassailable political powerhouse.
The army doesn’t like it because too many serving and retired generals continue to believe that they are smarter than everyone else in this country. They are not (but they are smart enough for the Khawaja Asifs of this world).
The average urban voter doesn’t like it because the average urban voter is young and audacious, and hates watching people in bigger cars, with nicer cell phones, mineral water in hand, whizzing by, while she rues the absence of distributive justice in her life. Anti-status quo forces can mobilise and activate thousands at the drop of a hat, because of how those voters feel as they watch the burden of unequal opportunities accumulate around them, nay, on them.
Imran Khan has used that feeling, borne out of fatigue with Nawaz Sharif, brilliantly for more than a quarter. That is a long time in politics anywhere. It is an admirable achievement. He has empowered that voice in Pakistan that wants to know when the Maryams and Bilawals will get out of the way, so that they can get their turn.
If the benchmark is what Khan said it was (the resignation of the PM), then Khan would have to be adjudged the loser of the dharnas. The prime minister doesn’t look like he’s resigning anytime soon. He never did.
Luckily, we don’t let Kaptaan decide on benchmarks. The real benchmark is whether Khan has made life intolerably difficult for all status-quo rulers, be they the Sharifs or the Bhutto-Zardaris. On that benchmark, he has won the dharna.
Serious structural reform is now inevitable. Nawaz Sharif can cling to Ishaq Dar and the 1990s for eternity, but he will not survive such indolence beyond 2018. To have any future, the PM must invest in wholesale reform that literally digs up the bureaucracy and administrative machinery the way he has dug up Islamabad for the metro bus.
PTI supporters should feel proud of what they their captain has achieved, and treat November 30 as a celebration of this achievement. This round is over and they won. Time to go home and prepare for the next round.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.