Complexities of Nawaz’s big win

Will he be able to stand up to the challenges?

In the weeks leading up to Pakistan’s most anticipated election, the notoriously unreliable polls in the country had gone haywire in their forecasts. Almost all polls had suggested that Nawaz Sharif, the man who had served as prime minister twice, and Imran Khan, the new figure to Pakistan’s political front, were neck and neck in the race. Nawaz and Imran had one thing in common; both were contesting on the conservative platform.

Perhaps this was the mistake the Pakistan Peoples Party and its coalition partners made; they relied on the hope that the right wing would fight it out amongst themselves, leaving the vote bank of the liberal parties untouched – at least in Sindh, PPP’s traditional stronghold. Serious security threats, high-profile targeting and absence of leadership added to PPP’s campaign failure, whose five-year tenure had left a bitter taste in the average Pakistani voter’s mouth.

This election, however, was not a war of ideologies – the division of Pakistan along ideological lines since the 1970s has become seriously convoluted as neo-liberalism became the order of the day when Pakistan picked up the pieces from the post-Zia era. There has been so much suppression of the Left in the previous decades that it almost does not exist along traditional lines anymore. And PPP, once the torch-bearer of Pakistan’s Left, has been an equal participant of its repression. Pakistan’s active student politics has been crushed, a right wing state rhetoric was strengthened over the last three decades and along the way, Pakistan’s politicians became comfortable with the idea that the public had no clear division between the Left and Right. It worked for the martial law administrators and it worked for the incumbent government.

There were other issues on the table in this election, the most important one being the shattered economy as a result of the electricity crisis. A meeting of the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) had deplored the electricity crisis earlier this year, saying that the biggest industry in Pakistan had failed to generate a single job over the last five years, even though it has the potential of creating at least five million jobs.

It is no wonder, then, that Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, headed by Nawaz Sharif, got a landslide victory in Faisalabad, the hub of Pakistan’s industrial zone where joblessness has been rampant because of the factories that had been forced to shut down in the wake of the worst load shedding in the country’s history. Nawaz is an industrialist and a flashy-project man. He had taken on huge projects in all of his previous tenures; a motorway from Islamabad to Lahore, a Metro Bus service in his hometown, subsidised education in Punjab, subsidised wheat scheme and not to mention Pakistan’s national pride, its first successful nuclear test. Whether or not these projects were a good idea remains debatable, but it impresses voters, especially those who do not understand or know about the failures of the market mechanism or the importance of nuclear arsenal along geostrategic lines.

Nawaz’s urban vote is not nearly as impressive as his rural vote, especially the turnout for his party in southern Punjab, where PML-N swept most seats. While it is an astounding achievement for the PML-N, the elections results also point to several things about the psyche of the voters: Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, voted for familiar candidates and known faces. It is no wonder, then, that PTI has lost in Punjab; it had fielded new candidates without fully campaigning in the smaller areas.

Furthermore, local issues took precedence over prevailing national crisis in this election. An example of this would be the Christian voters of Punjab. After the horrific tragedy of the Badami Bagh fire where nearly 200 houses and 80 shops were burned down under a PML-N provincial government, Christian voters, when asked who they would vote for, replied with conviction: the tiger (PML-N). This was not out of some blind loyalty to Nawaz, especially because of his dubious dealings with the Lashkar-e-Jhanvi and his links to extremist groups, but because his party did something for their community: they built them new homes, distributed a lot of compensation money and overall satisfied the immediate needs of the community. This looks impressive during an election campaign and it was no wonder that PML-N swept the minority vote in Punjab.

However, there was a clear division of votes along class lines. This is precisely why Imran Khan’s supporters are so disgruntled. A section of urban youth went and voted for the first time, and for them, casting that vote in itself was a revolution. Imagine their disappointment when their “revolution” backfired as PTI failed to secure majority votes in the province (as many polls and expert opinions had indicated). In the aftermath of May 11 election, angry PTI loyalists, which include the upper-middle class youth, came out to protest against what they felt was unfairness of the electoral process. Traditional authoritarianism during military rule in Pakistan had served to thoroughly depoliticise these youth. This of course did not mean that these voters had been oppressed in the way student wings had suffered in Zia’s era and hence lacked the sufficient “revolutionary” fervor, and overall anger, when they went and voted.

These voters are new to freer media, have a basic understanding of national issues and an overall sense of injured Pakistani pride which they hoped to restore by making a “new” Pakistan. They did not understand, or even seek to understand, why PML-N got the majority that it did. An overwhelming majority of Pakistan is NOT upper-middle class and had voted for the party which they believed could best fulfill their needs. Clever fielding of candidates, familiarity with the faces and PML-N’s records of flashy projects all came together to tip the balance heavily in their favour. Simply put, the election of 2013 was the election of the rural voters.

Now that he is back at the helm, Nawaz needs to address the immediate load shedding crisis. It is a known fact that anyone who solves that problem will secure the majority win in the next election. While Nawaz would want to secure the prime minister’s spot for himself this time around, he needs to secure his political legacy and is hence readying his progeny. Therefore, securing PML-N as a lasting dominant force via solving an electricity plague that has lasted over a decade will be a priority.

But while Nawaz might devote all his force to eliminating load shedding from the country, there are shadowy links between the party’s ideological ties with banned outfits. In this election, Nawaz gave out party tickets to banned Lashar-e-Jhanvi-linked Chaudhry Abid Raza from NA-107 and Sardar Ebaad Dogar from NA-178 who is an ardent disciple of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and who had announced Rs 20 million-bounty to assassinate Salmaan Taseer for siding with Aasia Bibi, a woman on death row for blasphemy. Raza won, Dogar lost to an independent candidate.

Nawaz has said that he would cooperate with the United States to end the War on Terror and extend support in the 2014 withdrawal. Nawaz will also have to figure out a way to work with Pakistan’s notorious establishment and its dubious dealings. As the United States is set to leave Afghanistan, Nawaz’s government will have to oversee the smooth passage of the trucks taking NATO equipment out of Afghanistan through Pakistan. These trucks will contain equipment and weapons and will remain exposed to the extremists which Pakistan’s murky establishment has been reluctant to get rid of. Nawaz, himself, has not displeased any extremist groups but has had a checkered past with the army. Figuring out balance is going to be a big challenge.

At the same time, there is a big question about how Nawaz plans on satisfying his voters when he has campaigned on a pro-business platform. While Pakistan’s politicians were busy campaigning, the caretaker government has all but announced an IMF emergency, one that comes with conditions. Naturally, the caretaker government, as it has reiterated several times in the past, is not equipped to deal with an IMF loan crisis, which is why they would have preferred to defer to the upcoming government. Now, Nawaz takes on the prime minister’s chair with a bailout plan in his lap that has taxation as an important condition. To tax, or not to tax, that would be the question, then.

The writer is web editor at Pakistan Today.