Well, it was a Sunday, the weather was nice, there was no chance of police baton charge and, given the leader’s views, there wasn’t any chance of any terrorist attack either. If the PTI’s vote-bank famously doesn’t have the stomach for less-than-perfect conditions, then Sunday’s conditions were ideal for a rally.
It was a hugely successful rally, something the party should be proud of. This show of public support indicates the party’s growing popularity. The PML(N) leaders who had sworn to leave politics if the Sunday rally could get an attendance of even 50,000 would have to eat their words. As has been stated in this very space earlier, however, the mechanics of putting together a rally are different from those that go into making a successful election campaign. It does help, yes, if a party that can do one wants to do the other but it doesn’t guarantee anything. The Jamaat-e-Islami is a case in point for illustrating how meaningless successful rallies at other points in time can be come election time.
Elections revolve not around rally numbers but an effective management – in the urban areas that the PTI is targeting – of the crisscrossing mesh of the networks of market associations, mohalla committees and caste divides that are laid out in each constituency. To segue into that: there is talk of “electables” joining the party now. That will, finally, put PTI on the electoral map. But it will also eat away into the moral higher ground that supporters of the party put up in its defence. Why? Because electable politicians come with the imperfections that those with feet on the ground almost invariably have. A viable enough set of candidates would positively look like a gallery of rogues to the urban middle-class sensibilities of average PTI supporters. Therein lies the party’s dilemma.
As a post-script: with the anti-PML(N) convention in Karachi and the PTI’s in Lahore, the Sharif brothers definitely had a bad hair day. Is the League increasingly getting walled in?
