The limits of the PTI’s political imagination
Despite the unstable security situation, the elections took place as scheduled amidst what seemed to be a rising tide of Pakistan Tehrik e Insaaf (PTI)’s political power. However, when the results started pouring in, the bourgeois PTI supporters and smug analysts alike were in for a nasty shock: the tsunami they had expected with iron-clad certainty did not turn out to be more than a modest trickle in Punjab.
Investigations into the PTI’s inability to sweep the Punjabi constituencies despite the formidable funding backing its campaign are a topic for a different article. In this piece I seek to rationalize the reaction this blow has elicited amongst indignant PTI supporters on social media websites.
While concerns about rigging, particularly in Karachi, are legitimate issues to take up with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), some of the views being perpetrated by the PTI voters raise important questions about the groups political imagination, or rather the constraints to it..
Most of these parochial expressions of political fealty to the PTI can be accessed on social media websites; most predictably so, since Imran Khan’s middle class support base are among the lucky few in this nation who have the money and leisure to own computers and use the internet.
A majority of the Naya Pakistan residents are aghast and infuriated that they have been deprived of their promised land. Why? The analysis cuts deep with its perspicacity: because the “jahil” masses are far too inane and uneducated to appreciate the all too abstracted notion of “change.”
Emphatic exclamations of the nation’s impending doom by tabdeeli razakaars include an outpouring of Punjabi hatred, the ethnic group that votes “only for itself and not for the country.” Historical arguments have also been marshaled to castigate the illiterate rural voter: “history repeated itself as the Punjabis didn’t side with Jinnah in 1937 either, and now they have done the same to his contemporary counterpart.”
Following conversations between the pro-PTI youth on Facebook and Twitter has been a morbid exercise. Why on earth, proclaims one Tweet, would people choose someone who does not even possess a Bachelors degree over an Oxford graduate? The problem is that they are uneducated and backward and “cannot even imagine ideas of challenging the status quo”, explain the sagely sympathisers. Perhaps a minimum BA qualification should be imposed for all voters, they concur. Great idea. Best save it for Naya Pakistan.
I am fully cognizant of exceptions lying outside the generalisation, but I am basing this on the overarching tone of pro-PTI social media activity which evidences the PTI’s lack of cross-class mobilization, perhaps the most obvious reason for its inability to overpower the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in the polls. The rage of its most vocal supporters is indicative of how the PML-N voting majority is a mythicized invisible, absent from their everyday social experience.
Despite making a commendable dent in Pakistan’s age-old dynastic political structure, the PTI has yet to emerge as a true grassroots party. Its campaign for these elections privileged the educated middle class over the rural and working class voter. As Muhammad Hanif points out, there was one problem: there just weren’t enough educated middle class kids from posh locales.
I believe the PTI has impressed and inspired many, including myself, with its electoral performance. At this point, a sobering self-analysis would serve the party’s young supporters well: if they wish to herald a New Pakistan then the task at hand is strengthening the party where it is at its weakest, i.e. in its appeal for the lower classes.
Needless to say, convincing the worker and the peasant to join the tabdeeli bandwagon is going to be no mean feat. If the young educated PTI zealots who swarm Ghazi Chowk over dubious claims of rigging as we speak want to overcome the obstacle the ‘jaahil’ presents, they must gear up for a long and arduous struggle of sustained involvement with the grueling day-to-day politics of the poor man, for whom every day sees a fight for basic survival. Unfortunately, I have yet to come across any PTI devotee who has even hinted at the long haul they should be in for, which sheds light on another problem with the PTI’s mobilization of the urban middle class youth: the tendency to see elections as the be all and end all of politics.
The fixation with liberal democracy as the ultimate embodiment of political action stems from the ideological control the state exercises over its subjects. States subsume all politics into their domain, obscuring real struggles of people in the process. The depoliticizing action of the state works by an equalizing illusion: an artificial leveling occurs whereby each individual’s ‘vote’ carries the same power, creating a superficial sense of parity between its various subjects. Following Marx, “between equal rights, force decides”: the false equality fostered by liberal democracy only abstracts actual sites of conflict, relegating all movements to calls for “good governance”, technical management and anti-corruption drives. The PTI’s middle class supporters buy into this travesty of democracy for obvious reasons: historically, the educated urbanites of Pakistan have praised apolitical bureaucratic management, privileging the state over the government. Unlike those at the fringes, this segment of society has always found representation of their interests and patronage within the Pakistani state, which guarantees their allegiance to the institution.
Thus, PTI’s well-off educated followers are wholeheartedly devoted to the singularity of liberal democracy as political expression and barred from imagining alternative modes of struggle. This explains the apocalyptic tone with which many of them lament the PTI’s electoral fate. Complete social transformation is no walk in the park, as Bulleh Shah puts its ‘Katthan faqeeri rastaa aashiq’, the faqeer who yearns to change the world around him must be prepared for hard labour, for the aashiq’s path is thorny, the terrain unyielding.
Unfortunately, the PTI youth’s statist political imagination gullibly assumes the removal of risk: identical to products on offer which come without their side-effects like decaffeinated coffee and fat-free ice cream, Pakistan’s middle class seem to yearn for and believe in a depoliticized politics. A politics without politics, struggle without struggle.
The writer is a member of staff.