Imran’s moment of opportunity?BY Dr Maleeha Lodhi

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The writer is special adviser to the Jang Group/Geo and a former envoy to the US and the UK.
Much has been written about Imran Khan’s Lahore jalsa and its impact on national politics. His huge and impressive rally has animated a lively public debate about whether the PTI leader can convert a visible groundswell of support into a serious challenge to the major political parties and emerge as a credible ‘third force’.
The dismissive tone adopted by Imran’s political opponents only revealed how rattled they were by his Lahore show. Their disingenuous effort to cast him as the ‘establishment’s choice’ showed they had nothing else to throw at him other than this tired and hackneyed charge. Some critics ascribed a flash-in-the-pan quality to his jalsa – a one-off event rather than the start of a game-changing trend.
In fact the Lahore rally seemed to crystallise deeper shifts in the public mood that have been underway for some time. Three trends are noteworthy and help to explain why Imran is receiving greater public traction now than in the past. The first and most obvious is growing public disenchantment with the two major parties. Popular discontent with politics-as-usual has been evidenced in successive opinion polls carried out by Gallup and Pew among others. They found public approval ratings for the major political leaders to have tumbled in the past three years.
Two, by emerging as a symbol of hope, Imran is tapping into the spirit of a younger generation that expects leaders to offer them an optimistic vision of the future. His call for a new politics that serves the public good and rejection of dysfunctional, dynastic politics are in sync with the widespread yearning for change across society.
And three, participation in the Lahore jalsa by members of the middle class suggests that a growing and more assertive urban middle class wants a greater voice in the country’s politics and governance and is prepared to engage in the political process that it shunned in the past. Many among the middle class see Imran as a possible vehicle for their unfulfilled aspirations. Their heavy attendance at the Minto Park rally was testimony to this.
But to sustain the impact of a successful rally Imran has to deal with many immediate challenges. He must quickly demonstrate an ability to transform himself from a celebrity-politician to a team-leader, assemble a credible team and evolve a serious and clear-cut platform of policy positions that goes beyond simplistic rah-rah rhetoric. His challenge is also to build a team that balances the need for ‘electables’ in his party with resisting expedient compromises that can erode his popular appeal. He will need to turn his youthful followers into actual voters and catalyse the rising tide of anti-incumbent sentiment into an effective organisation capable of fighting elections.
There are factors at play that can both help and hinder Imran’s political prospects. In many respects the political environment is more ripe for a ‘third force’ than ever before. Politics has increasingly been lagging behind social and economic changes of the past two decades that have been reshaping the national landscape. Several economic and other factors, the impact of globalisation and spread of information technology have injected new dynamics into the political arena. But Pakistan’s politics has yet to catch up with its implications.
A wave of urbanisation has produced a larger middle class that seeks a bigger political voice. Demographic changes have led to a youth bulge. An increasingly youthful population with unmet expectations can be an important political force. Modern communications and expansion of the broadcast media have created a more ‘connected’ society which has been changing the way people relate to the government and what they expect of it. This dynamic has already led to sustained voices for a more accountable and responsive government.
Traditional political parties have mostly ignored these political currents and been unwilling to adapt to them. The disillusionment this has engendered among a wary public is reflected not just in the crumbling public standing of many political leaders, but in the growing numbers of voters staying away from the ballot box. In 2008 – an election that took place after prolonged military rule and in the charged atmosphere of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination – more than half the electorate, 56 per cent, did not vote.
By-elections that followed reinforced this trend even if allowance is made for the fact that turnout is always less in by-polls than general elections. Turnout of 20 percent in a Lahore seat in March 2010 denoted a phenomenon that should have rung alarm bells even for the winning party. But neither of the two main parties paid attention to an important political fact: that low and declining voter turnout over the years in large part reflected the public’s rejection of the narrow political choice offered to them at the ballot box.
This also gives rise to a central paradox of Pakistani politics today: while the two main parties and their regional allies continue to win the bulk of parliamentary seats, the political ground is shifting in ways that is creating a gap between electoral politics and changing patterns and mood in society. This presents Imran Khan with both a challenge and opportunity.
The opportunity to align politics with a changing society is there for him to seize. But he also has to contend with the entrenched structures of traditional politics that still dominate or determine electoral contests and outcomes. Representational politics continues to pivot around patron-client relationships built on hierarchical social structures of kinship and lineage. Patronage-dominated politics rests on working the spoils system. And this makes electoral contests principally about gaining access to state patronage and then distributing it to reward supporters.
Patron-client forms of political representation involve working networks of rural ‘feudal’ relationships and biradari or tribal alignments to mobilise electoral support. The major parties are mostly extensions of influential families, biradaris, and local influentials even if the PPP has retained some of its original populist following.
The ability of members or scions of prominent political families and the rural elite to win parliamentary seats is also because constituencies are still delimited on the basis of old census data. Also boundary demarcations have historically mirrored the distribution of clan or biradari groups especially in Punjab. This reinforces the hold of biradari leaders on the electoral game. As there has been no census since 1998, elections predicated on old numbers do not reflect the country’s greater urbanisation and end up over representing rural Pakistan.
Unless there is a comprehensive delimitation of parliamentary constituencies (rather than the customary tweaking that precedes elections) newer parties will be at an electoral disadvantage. Imran Khan has yet to demand this as part of wide ranging electoral reforms. These are urgent especially after the Election Commission recently found millions of fake voters on the electoral register.
A key question this raises is whether conventional politics and electoral factors that privilege the present incumbents can be trumped – as happened in 1970 – by a new political force that is able to override the entrenched instruments of power and influence? The answer is that if anything can, it will be the combination of a powerful idea or message, a strong team and an effective political organisation that can mobilise what is clearly a widespread desire for change in the country. A leader’s personal charisma alone is insufficient for any enduring political transformation.
Whether Imran Khan can effectively take on this daunting mission only time will tell. But what he has already done is to reinvigorate the country’s jaded politics and revive a lost passion for active citizenship. He has challenged the parties of patronage by his promise of a new politics of public service. He has also thrown down the gauntlet to the middle class that has long been content to carp at Pakistan’s corrupt and hide-bound politics while abdicating to a political class that has produced uninspired and uninspiring leaders who have failed to either lead or govern.





Imran’s moment of opportunity?