PML-N, PTI and PPP

• Then and now

The run-up to the election seems to have changed all principal parties almost beyond recognition. PML-N has been wriggling and struggling ever since the Panama verdict threw out Nawaz Sharif. And with Nawaz’s (perhaps) inevitable ‘clash’ with institutions now having played out for a while, the party’s entire outlook seems to have changed. Facing unprecedented desertions, including senior, long-time loyalists, and unrelenting pressure from the judiciary – something that has led them to raise the prospect deliberate institutional interference – the party is a very different creature from the 2013 outing. Even the N in its name seems likely to go turning it, quite literally, into a new party.

PTI, too, is hardly the ‘party against status quo’ of a few years ago. And with the steadily growing induction of ‘electables’ over the last few months, it has not only stood conventional political science on its head, but also blatantly compromised on its own core principles and ideology; something that is reflected in the dharna in Banigala. If actions do speak louder than words, PTI could not be more vocal about its one-point agenda of winning the election, whatever it takes.

PPP, sadly, changed a long time ago. How BB’s assassination got it the sympathy vote in 2008, and how Zardari’s party squandered the good will, and how the party is still broken from the 2013 rout, is already a story much told and retold. Pakistani politicians tend to celebrate transfer of power from one civilian government to another. Yet there’s precious little for the people to rejoice when more or less the same faces, with largely similar interests, hop from party to party at election time and return to ‘serve’ them in the same way they always have. Even before the election it is abundantly clear that whichever way the vote goes, it will be business as usual for the common man.