Winning in a ‘slave nation’

PTI Chairman Imran Khan has become rather enamoured of the idea that Pakistan is a slave nation and Pakistanis are slaves. It is now an increasingly consistent theme, and the bedrock of his post vote of no-confidence ‘haqiqi azadi movement’.

In Charsadda on May 29, at the peak of this post deposal movement, Khan spoke of India being a free country, and Pakistan being a slave. Someone forgot to share the memo with Narendra Modi, himself on a mission to free India and provide Indians with ‘haqiqi azadi’. Unlike Imran Khan, Prime Minister Modi is still prime minister, and being prime minister is an absolutely essential part of the securing of true freedom. A major victory for Indian freedom was secured just this past week when India was further freed from slavery as the historical ‘Rajpath’ road in New Delhi was renamed ‘Kartavya Path’. The net impact on India’s GDP growth from this historic and brave decision is incalculable – but putting a price on this kind of freedom is itself a fool’s errand.

This is why, in his first attempt to free Pakistanis from slavery to, for example, debt – domestic and foreign – Imran Khan increased the total stock of debt for Pakistanis from Rs29 trillion in 2018 to Rs40 trillion in 2019, then Rs44 trillion in 2020, then Rs47 trillion in 2021, and Rs60 trillion in 2022. In short, PM Imran Khan helped double Pakistan’s total indebtedness in the short stint he enjoyed as the leader of this enslaved nation and people.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a country accumulating debt. The most indebted nations on the planet are the ones that have given their people first world problems: obesity epidemics, global weather systems altering levels of gas guzzling vehicles, on-demand video game wars to destroy the far-away and the cretinous. Pakistan too can have all this – but to do so, according to the great slave-freeing Imran Khan, it must first re-hire Khan as its leader.

What kind of a slave is Pakistan? Not a particularly useful one. The Chinese are unhappy with it – despite spending upwards of $60 billion on doubling Pakistan’s energy and road infrastructure. According to Imran Khan, the Chinese have just watched Pakistan undertake a regime change at the behest of the Americans.

The Americans themselves aren’t too happy either. Don’t let Derek Cholet and Samantha Power fool you. All their friends in Washington DC, at the State Department, at the Pentagon and at Langley, will welcome them back incredulously: “You went where?!?” “You want to help the Paks?” “After how badly they treated us for twenty years in Afghanistan?”. What kind of slave allows his or her master to be so royally disengaged and disappointed? For two decades?

Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries are another favourite theme for our freedom loving Kaptaan. There he is a little more circumspect. But his supporters cannot get enough of bad-mouthing Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha. Yet those three countries are also constantly left wanting more from Pakistan. More consistency, more predictability, more meaningful support when it matters.

In all seriousness of course, the narrative of being a slave is merely a tool for Imran Khan and the PTI to continue to manipulate a large share of Pakistani voters. Every majoritarian populist needs oversimplified narratives that pit the good versus the evil. The good are helpless pawns. Enslaved by those more powerful. The evil enjoy absolute power and are invested in subjugating the primary identity of the good.

Enter the Muslim and her or his innate freedom from slavery. Khan’s deployment of the Muslim ethos is just about the single most genius bit of politics in a career that is increasingly racking up a body count for the ages. Khan has masterfully blended the ordinary Pakistani Muslim voters’ sense of self-esteem, and sense of shame with his quest for high office. His speeches since April this year are among the best framed, and most artfully delivered political rhetoric Pakistan has seen since the Altaf Hussain of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Magnetic, majestic and magical: Khan has tapped into the anatomy of the Pakistani middle-class spirit. But Purana Pakistan acolytes should be careful, Kaptaan has tapped not into a fringe capillary relegated to some gated DHA community. He has cut straight into the aorta of Pakistani politics and the mainstream national discourse. There are now three types of Imran Khan supporters.

The first group is the dedicated Insafi that is fully invested in Khan as the magic bullet for everything. It seems harsh to label all of these folks as cultists, but there are enough behavioural qualities in this large cohort to at least partly qualify exactly as that. Regardless of the lengths to which Insafis will go, these are largely ideological political followers and merit a modicum of respect.

The second group is the opportunists; this is the Pervez Elahi wing of the party. This comprises both people that are politically orphaned and have nowhere to go (like Fawad Chaudhry) and people who need to be aligned with Imran Khan to win an election (like the hordes of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Karachi politicians that need the PTI electoral symbol in order to win an election). This is an Achilles Heel cohort for Imran Khan because without them, he may struggle in a free and fair election. With them, his rhetoric of clean governance is the same joke that it was when he flew into Islamabad in 2018 on the Jahangir Tareen and Aleem Khan ATM cards.

So far, so good. Khan has always had these two groups of supporters – and the level of excitement among them, of course, waxes and wanes. But there is now a large and powerful third group within his camp that is constantly ignored by the wide array of non-Imran Khan leadership in the country.

What the military leadership and the Sharif-Bhutto-Zardari combine need to really address and what they fail to grasp is the impact of this third group. For lack of a better terminology, the third group is the status quo fatigue group. The reason nothing from the substantial slew of allegations against Khan sticks is not that the Farah Gogi revelations, or the Toshakhana declarations aren’t credible. It is because the allegations themselves are tired and trite. They don’t affect Khan because Pakistani voters are actually a lot smarter than what television news or social media would have people believe. The most potent segment of support for Imran Khan is not among die hard Insafis or political opportunists. Nor is the support predicated on people being too stupid to understand or know that Khan is vastly imperfect, a rhetorical genius, but also a purveyor of fictions, and compromised on nearly every front that he claims to represent. Yet his support continues to grow. This is a measure not of Imran Khan’s appeal – but of the repellant nature of everything that stands against Khan and his rhetoric.

Khan can get away with the idiocy of calling Pakistan a slave nation – even though its autonomy and sovereign status are incredibly well established. He can get away with claiming that he will secure true freedom – even though this freedom was assured in 1947, and if ever again, then in 1998. He can even get away with re-orienting Pakistani Muslim identity with religious rhetoric that is often inaccurate and sometimes even offensive.

He can get away with all this because the thing he truly has come to represent is resistance to the thing that the ordinary Pakistani now resents with a fervor that is unprecedented. The indignity of being an ordinary Pakistani – the lack of economic opportunity, the absence of a coherent macro narrative, the certainty of injustice, the broken and dysfunctional infrastructure, the poor public services, the expensive private solutions, the cities in disrepair and the absence of any exciting alternatives. It all adds up.

The median age in Pakistan is 23. Imran Khan’s falsetto has no integrity, no rigour – but what it lacks in soul and spirit, it makes up in aesthetics. It makes people feel hopeful. It is empowering. It energizes.

What is the alternative to Imran Khan? Rows and rows and rows of shell-shocked symbols of the status quo. Standing helplessly as Khan layers into them. Only able to affirm Khan’s framing of them: “Welcome to Purana Pakistan”. “Yes, we are the status quo”. “No, we can’t change”.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.