MUCH as everyone would want to come out completely and irreversibly out of the 1990s the ghosts, new and old, threaten to pull them back into the phase made infamous by ever-feuding politicians with little training in wrapping their raw desires and tendencies in respectable covering. One of these threats is, of course, Imran Khan, who in turn has his own demons which keep pushing him towards the danger zone.

The PTI chief is aghast at the deals the PPP and PML-N are destined to strike over all matters at various points in the proceedings. Imran loves to pontificate about the demerits of compromise between power players, until his attention is drawn towards his own party’s little adjustments in favour of power. The moral ground is easy to gain but difficult to retain, more difficult in the area where the party is in power.

What the recent Senate elections did was that they placed the focus on the PTI-dominated Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This was where all the excitement was, to an extent due to the presence of PTI as a new party with its own patterns to create on the country’s politics. The people were keen to find out just how different Imran Khan’s members were from the others that the PTI chief habitually castigates.

The moral ground is easy to gain but difficult to retain, more difficult in the area where the party is in power.

The PTI did claim to be maintaining clean stables, but by the end of the exercise, it could hardly prove that it was pioneering a permanent change on the way to establishing some kind of principled politics in the country — if ever the task was possible. The party was again sorely missing and the way the election process was conducted reduced it to a not too-pleasing exercise in controlling the herd, through the application of old tactics to discipline anyone who fell out of line.

The comparison between the ideal he once claimed to be pursuing and the current trajectory of his party in itself is deemed by some to be unnecessary. The contention is that the ‘ideological period’ is long over and it’s been the power dynamics that have been determining PTI’s politics in more recent years.

But by occupying the high seat of the moralist, PTI ensures that in the event it is seen to be erring on the side of power, the taunts thrown its way are going to be more caustic than the ones that are so frequently heaped on those it had set out to not just replace but to make redundant.

This — decision to fight the Senate elections after dismissing the 2013 general polls as fraud — was not Imran’s first compromise. This certainly was his biggest so far and the one which will now be used to visualise the extent to which he would be willing to compromise to stay in contention for power.

The PTI had always insisted that the change could be brought in by the leadership, the singular leader, by Imran Khan alone. Others who had been chastened by the emptiness of this boast in the past had instead craved a party — right-wing or progressive, but a popular party setting a trend in organising people at the basic level nonetheless.

If that was an objective which was routinely dismissed as the dream of the naïve and the impractical, there was no dearth of those who would say that short of that basic ingredient, those committed to ‘real’ change would end up chasing an illusion. Now, those in opposition to Imran Khan have a genuine reason to be overjoyed by his party’s slip from the high pedestal to an existence where it can easily be compared with others in the race.

Many have little sense of loss as they receive the news of a PTI lawmaker, and a very vocal one at that, embroiling himself in a fake-degree controversy in Peshawar. This is their moment to celebrate, just as it is an occasion for the aspiring reformists to reassert their commitment in one man and his leadership. Even that could have made greater sense if Imran Khan had not been so helplessly dependent on the worldly methods employed by Chief Minister Pervez Khattak to see him — and not to forget his party — through this latest little battle with the agents of no-change.

The in-party greetings that have come the way of Khattak since the victory in the Senate polls in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would be a welcome sign for those in the opposite camp, made up of the so-called status quo parties. These parties will be wary of PTI managing to prove its allegations that the 2013 assembly election was grossly rigged. In the meanwhile, however, they would be happy to note any signs that indicate that PTI was learning to live with the system, settling for any perks and powers it could lay its hands on and learning to not rock the boat too strongly and abruptly to its own benefit and to everyone else’s.

All the parties, it is said, must display caution so as to not risk a repeat of the acrimony-filled 1990s. The PTI is often cast as a villain that is threatening the peace, or the mere appearance of it, as seasoned politicians sit in a huddle wisely sorting out crucial issues related to public rule just as some important tasks are outsourced to more capable agencies.

A distinction has to be made here whether the joint front is out to only frustrate PTI or is a defence of the old players against the desire for change among Pakistanis. A distinction has to be made between how these veteran politicians have been honouring the desire for public rule through their own offices and their interpretations of democracy. Once this exercise is done, there will always be room for a party that refuses to be treated as a herd of sheep or one whose leadership is eager to not hide its own weaknesses in grand chants about democracy.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2015

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