- And our dear politicians
With PTI reinventing political science to justify its obsession with ‘electables’, PML-N struggling to hold on to ‘loyalists’ and PPP, astonishingly, still reeling from the 2013 drubbing, it does not exactly seem as if the upcoming election will produce a government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’, and all that. Rather than ‘the people’, whom democracy is supposed to serve and address, out politics continues to revolve around industrial and feudal barons who have dominated parliament more or less since independence.
What little hope PTI represented was, sadly, dashed well before the last leg of the campaign got underway. After ‘struggling for twenty years’ – as Imran never tires of reminding everybody – against the ‘forces of the status quo’, he simply opened the party’s doors for the politicians he constructed his politics against, and readily sidelined his own loyalists for known opportunistic turncoats. Now his vote bank is just as shocked party workers demonstrating in Banigala; about the implications of PTI’s strong leaning towards politics of patronage after parroting revolution and change since forever. And PML-N, too – despite three decades of power – remains as detached from the man-on-the-street as ever. Even now, it is counting on retaining what remains of its ‘electables’ presently bee-lining at PTI’s head office and analysts are weighing the impact of outside events, like the health of Mrs Nawaz Sharif (may she recover quickly), on the election more than the party’s foreign, economic or security policy.
Politicians have long blamed, often with good reason, non-democratic forces (sometimes aliens) of impacting the country’s democratic process. Yet even when democracy is left to strengthen, and one government passes reins of power to the next, politicians themselves violate the sanctity of the institution. As we speak, most prominent politicians have written down the value of their assets, lied about their possessions on media, received all sorts of gifts that have left most of them fabulously rich, and never once connected with the grass root. From the people’s perspective, whose lot never changes no matter which variety of government holds office, democracy might as well be government ‘of electables, for electables, by electables’.
