Imran, Bilawal, ifs and buts

Published October 26, 2014
— Illustration by Abro
— Illustration by Abro

The game’s afoot. The future is here. And it’s all boiling down to two men: Imran Khan and Bilawal Bhutto — possible future prime ministers of Pakistan. One’s elevation seems more immediate than the other. The other, Bilawal, still has some way to go. But has Khan really arrived?

So why Khan? This question shouldn’t be so tough anymore to answer. Fumbling, mumbling, ranting and raving across his now 17-year-old political career, he has finally managed to turn his main support base — the urban bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie — into an effective, media-savvy and more importantly, a highly visible (and audible) populist political cluster.

Swept aside as a loud but harmless player in politics for most of his 17 years in the field, Khan eventually managed to storm in, pushing and shoving his way into the corridors of mainstream politics and proving himself to be a plausible contender in the always fluid race for Pakistan’s top political post.

Three factors helped him achieve this: (1) The populist private electronic media that found in him a man that guaranteed ratings-friendly viewership; (2) A helping hand and push (allegedly) by some shadowy folks who were once related to ‘sensitive agencies’; and (3) through the man’s own overwhelming charisma, endurance and never-say-never attitude.


Who will call the shots, Imran or Bilawal? Only time will tell


Khan’s charisma is not only about his looks or what a great cricketer he once was or what a crackling ‘playboy’ image he once walked around with before he hit middle age in the early 1990s.

It’s more than this. Because the majority of his young supporters today were not even born when he was demolishing opponents on the cricket field or sweeping pretty maidens off their feet with his Casanova-meets-Tarzan demeanour.

Such memories to most of Khan’s younger fans are of a hand-me-down nature ­­— derived from tales of yore, but still largely elusive.

So, though his allure of being a skilful sporting hunk and social magnet can only be related to by his younger fans on an impersonal (even mythical) level, this charisma becomes personal and real to them when he expresses it as a political figure — mainly by turning his rallies into political manifestations of the more pleasing aspects of his life as a cricketing star and socialite.

As a star sportsman and jetsetter, he was a rather contrary personality. A thinking, determined and diligent cricketer, and at the same time a compulsive risk-taker who was almost reflexively arrogant and self-centred. He played his cricket hard and partied even harder!

He manoeuvres his politics almost the same way he moved his fielders (as captain) on the cricket field, depending on what kind of a batsman he was up against.

In his rallies, he puts in the slips, mid-on and mid-off, a short-leg, maybe a long-on or a fine-leg, depending on how he is bowling. So the field placing in the context of his rallies will have song, dance, Iqbal, Jinnah, scriptural allusions and tales of morality, subtle Casanova moves, Tarzan antics, more song and dance and even more scriptural stuff.

Because when he looks across the large number of people that turn up to see him speak, he can quite clearly view the potpourri of the multitude in front of him: ‘Burger’ kids, trendy yuppie uncles and aunts, gasping young men and women (both bearded and shaven, in hijabs and without), and also excited men who were perhaps once supporters of conservative parties such as the PMLN and Jamaat-i-Islami.

Khan’s gotten on a roll and he isn’t getting off. One isn’t quite sure exactly how he plans to dish out his libertarianism-meets-socialism-meets-European social democracy- meets-‘Islamic welfare state’-meets- ZA Bhutto-meets-Iqbal-meets-Jinnah-meets-Mehmood Ghaznavi plan, but rest assured, he may actually be on the verge of becoming the next Pakistani PM. An exciting prospect, indeed, even if wrought with uncertainties.

Another exciting vista in this context is emerging in the shape of Bilawal Bhutto, the 26-year-old co-chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). The PPP, that till even 2008 was Pakistan’s largest political outfit, has today been restricted to the electoral confines of the Sindh province.

The tragic demise of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 saw her husband Asif Ali Zardari trying to keep the party intact (through some clever pragmatic politics). But his cold endeavours saw the party gradually losing its populist sheen and appeal in the rapidly evolving political scenario of Pakistan.

Truth is, the rise of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the economic and political expansion of the urban middle-classes have even begun to highlight the complacency of the established ‘middle-class friendly’ parties such as PMLN and MQM as well.

But with the enlargement of the middle-classes in this regard, the working classes and the peasants who still constitute the bulk of Pakistan’s electoral clusters, have been turned into melodramatic and somewhat clichéd caricatures in the new bourgeoisie-dominated narrative.

Working-class politics has gone out of the picture. Fighting for its cause is not sexy anymore. On the one hand, demagogic bourgeoisie populism attacking ‘white-collar corruption’ and denouncing the ‘ruling (non-middle-class) elite’ is taking the cake, while on the other hand, navel-gazing about the more abstract notions of things like constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and democracy has become the intangible defence of those being put under the microscope by the new cake hunters.

Here is where Bilawal comes in. Or at least is trying to. As a teen he once told an interviewer that he was not interested in politics. But then his dynamic mother was still alive.

However, after her assassination in 2007, he was hurled into the field (as if almost in a panic by party bosses), and a few years later he is now being looked upon to save a party that has won four of Pakistan’s nine elections, but which, after the 2013 election, is even struggling to hold on to its electoral epicentre, Sindh.

Not only was he a reluctant entrant, he hardly knew any Urdu! His understanding of Pakistani politics is still rather academic, but as he stumbled his way to make sense of it all across some immature interactions on social media and embarrassing outbursts against the party’s opponents (both real and imagined), later this year he finally comprehended his foremost calling: to regenerate and re-enact the perception of the PPP as being Pakistan’s largest leftist option, and the ‘party of the poor.’

In a marathon speech (during the PPP’s rally in Karachi on October 18) this year, he roughly outlined how he plans to revive the party from being a lethargic, aging dinosaur and a populist has-been, to becoming relevant once again (in the 21st century context).

The many populist flourishes and jingoistic nuances in his rhetoric suggested that he wants to reintroduce into the party the unique ideological mixture concocted by his grandfather (and the party’s founder), Z.A. Bhutto; a mixture prepared with radical democratic-socialism and populist Muslim/Pakistan nationalism. Bilawal then wants to patch it all up with his mother Benazir’s idea of post-Cold War left-liberalism.

Of course, just as it is with Khan, thus far it’s mostly about ideas and rhetoric with Bilawal as well. But the concept of a once powerful populist party of the left, attempting to regenerate itself as a modern version of its more pumped up and dynamic past is indeed an exciting prospect — though wrought with numerous ifs and buts.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 26th, 2014

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