The state of the PTI

A year ago, the hugely successful Lahore jalsa was the big bang which put the PTI on the political map of the country after a decade-and-a-half on the margins. It kindled popular enthusiasm for the party and started a wave of “electables” from other parties flocking to the PTI and jostling for top positions. The Lahore rally was followed by others in several major cities which kept up the momentum for a time.

But if the surge of fresh entrants testified to the emergence of the PTI as a major contender for seats in the coming elections, it also confronted the party chairman with some new problems. Not every “electable” who was admitted to the party brought with him a pristine reputation. Some at least have a tainted record and many have changed party loyalties quite frequently in the past. As a result, the PTI’s claim to be a clean party has suffered.

Associates of long standing who had stood by Imran in the party’s lean years have been sidelined. Almost all the party leaders who are seen rubbing shoulders with Imran in public these days are those who joined him after the Lahore rally. The disenchantment among the old and committed members is palpable and the fissures are becoming wider and more visible.

All this has taken a toll. Public opinion surveys show a significant fall in the party’s ratings. After having led the field for nearly a year, Imran now trails Nawaz Sharif. A more worrisome sign for the PTI is the beginning of reverse defections from the party.

Against this background, the “peace march” which Imran led to South Waziristan gave a small but much-needed boost to the party’s fortunes. The biggest-ever motorcade of political stalwarts and party faithful to head towards the country’s tribal areas did not reach its destination but it enabled Imran to affirm solidarity with the people of Fata in a way that both government leaders and the traditional parties have failed to do. That he went ahead with the march despite the threats and the risks won him the respect of the people of the tribal areas and cemented his reputation as a man of personal courage.

The march also benefited him politically by giving him a chance to grab the headlines for nearly a week and restored some of the party’s lost sheen. The JUI-F and the Nawaz League, as well as the other parties, professed to remain unimpressed but they have clearly been outsmarted by someone they have long tried to dismiss as a political novice. For Fazlur Rahman, the pain was the greater because the march took place on territory which he considers both literally and figuratively his own preserve. Nor did Imran suffer any damage from the sniping from the “liberal” commentators in the media who sought to equate his opposition to drone attacks with support for the TTP.

But the fleeting success of the peace march did nothing to address the larger problems which cloud PTI’s election prospects. The main problem is that it is looking increasingly like the traditional political parties which serve as fiefdoms of the country’s landed class and of the big industrial and business families.

After having long reviled these parties for most of the country’s ills, Imran has now turned to the same class of people to make his party “electable.” His claim to stand for a new brand of politics, which attracted the middle class to the PTI, has suffered a major blow as a result.

Like the leaders of the other parties, Imran is now surrounded increasingly by courtiers and sycophants vying for his attention and favours. All officeholders have been handpicked by him and serve at his pleasure. Many of the major decisions are taken by him personally and autocratically without adequate consultation. His political judgement is of course not perfect, though he probably does not know it. Besides, the way he has associated himself with some political and religious charlatans shows that he is not the best judge of character.

The task of building up the party organisation on sound lines does not seem to be a high priority. The PTI still has little presence in the rural areas. Party elections have not been held since 2002. Now there is the fear that if the long-promised elections are held in the coming months, the party could splinter.

It is likely that many of those who are presently holding senior party offices would lose, and might quit even before the parliamentary elections.

Like the country’s traditional political parties, the PTI is also becoming a party of the rich privileged class. This was clearly visible in the high number of SUVs and luxury cars—many with personalised registration numbers that our super-rich, old and new, likes to flaunt—in the motorcade that wound its way from Islamabad to Kotkai. The same disproportionately high presence of the well-heeled and the Facebook types is seen in the party’s political meetings.

The peculiarly Pakistani distinction between the party “leader” and the party “worker,” which reflects the class divisions in the country, crept into the PTI after it threw open its doors to “electables” of all kind last year. Anyone who saw the way free food packets were thrown at party “workers” at a jalsa organised recently by Javed Hashmi, the self-proclaimed baghi (rebel) against no one knows what, would be filled with disgust.

The PTI leadership has been lulled into complacency by its good showing in public opinion surveys. But in Pakistan these polls do not always translate into parliamentary seats. The voter’s choice depends not only on a candidate’s party affiliation but equally, if not more, on other factors, such as the baradri to which he belongs and the resources he possesses to hire party “workers.” The results are also distorted by the first-past-the-post system, as the Supreme Court pointed out last June in its judgment on a petition by the Pakistan Workers Party.

The party is banking a lot on the youth vote. But young people do not form a voting block any more than left-handed people do. People vote not by age but, ultimately, according to their economic interests.

The PTI has produced several documents on its socio-economic programme. But elections are won not on good PowerPoint presentations or the finer points of the party’s manifesto. What matters much more is the overall message that they convey. The message from Imran has so far largely been limited to a commitment to eradicate corruption and end US drone strikes. That is not enough. Imran has yet to show that he feels the pain of the country’s vast majority which suffers in silence at the hands of a rapacious “elite.”

Bhutto was able to defeat the “electables” of his day because his message in the 1970 election struck a chord. That message was not genuine because Bhutto had no intention of rocking the boat. But it stuck, because the people wanted to believe it. More than four decades after that election, his party is still reaping the fruits.

Imran is certainly no man of the masses. But if he is to have any chance of winning the election, he has to deliver a similar electrifying message to the common man which cuts across lines of ethnicity, region and baradri. He must tell them that their future is solely in their own hands, that they can change their destiny by casting their votes wisely, and that they must learn to stand tall, walk straight and look their oppressors in the eye.

But since Imran, unlike Bhutto, is not good at lying, he must first believe in that message himself. If he can make that leap, he could go down in history as the man who made a difference.

The writer is a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service. Email: asifezdi@yahoo.com