Two days before Imran Khan called off his party’s ‘lockdown’ of Islamabad, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Parvez Khattak, made a rather extraordinary speech during a gathering of charged PTI supporters who were planning to storm the capital as a protest against the federal government of Mian Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N.

Khattak suggested in his speech that the federal government’s plan to block the entry of PTI supporters into Islamabad from KP will be seen as the ruling elite cutting off the Pakhtuns from the rest of Pakistan. He then went on to warn that this will force the Pakhtuns to become ‘rebels’ (baaghi).

The speech was extraordinary because PTI has positioned itself as a centre-right Pakistani nationalist party. It is hell-bent on grabbing the Punjab, which is the gateway to political power in Pakistan. Yet, it was in the Pakhtun-dominated KP where it won an impressive victory during the 2013 election. And even though PTI has retained its status as being the second largest party in the Punjab, its most combative support comes from youthful Pakhtuns.

When PTI was trying to rouse its supporters to force their way into Islamabad, its support base in the Punjab did not respond the way the party was expecting it to. There are two theories about why this happened. On the one hand this might have been the result of an effective government crackdown on PTI’s cadre, which saw numerous pre-emptive arrests. Other analysts posit that even though this base does help the party hold impressive rallies in the province, apparently it was not in favour of Khan taking the more radical path of toppling the sitting regime through street agitation.

What drove Khattak to use a bygone Pakhtun nationalist rhetoric and what might be the repercussions?

PML-N had swept the 2013 polls in the Punjab and has enjoyed electoral dominance here ever since the early 1990s. Only PTI’s radical and youthful Pakhtun lot exhibited any willingness to enthusiastically participate in the planned lockdown.

Is this why Khattak added the Pakhtun nationalist dimension to his speech? The discourse did not manage to rouse enough men and women for the federal government to readjust its otherwise forceful intent to stop PTI supporters from entering Islamabad, but Khattak’s rhetoric did attract controversy.

Most interesting was the way many PTI supporters in the Punjab reacted. They were not amused. In fact, many of them did not know quite how to respond, especially to Khattak’s startling summation that ‘PTI is a Pakhtun party!’

A political commentator suggested (in a tweet) that Khatak’s rhetoric in this regard had to do with the frustration the party’s voters in the KP have been feeling. I asked him to elaborate, and he messaged this back: ‘With not much to show by way of concrete development in the KP, and Khan putting more effort in trying to win the Punjab, the party’s KP leadership feels that it is alienating its voters in the province.’

If so, then rather curiously (or even desperately) Khattak chose to sustain the party’s Pakhtun support in KP by reinvigorating a narrative which, by the 1990s, had largely withered away. Such rhetoric was once associated with the now defunct National Awami Party (NAP) a forerunner of PTI’s most prominent opponent in the KP, the Awami National Party(ANP).

The speech was extraordinary because PTI has positioned itself as a centre-right Pakistani nationalist party. It is hell-bent on grabbing the Punjab, which is the gateway to political power in Pakistan.

Though the ANP remains a Pakhtun nationalist outfit, it has greatly watered-down its predecessor NAP’s more radical ethno-nationalist outlook. During the first decade of Pakistan, the Punjabis and the Mohajirs (Urdu-speakers) dominated the country’s political and economic elites. This gave birth to prominent left-leaning ethno-nationalist groups among the Bengalis, Pakhtuns, Sindhis and the Baloch. However, during the regime of Ayub Khan (who hailed from KP) in the 1960s, the process of bringing the Pakhtuns into the mainstream scheme of things was consciously initiated.

The Pakhtuns’ entry in this respect saw the eventual relegation and ouster of the Mohajirs from the political elite, triggering the birth of ‘Mohajir nationalism’ in the 1980s. Interestingly, Sindhi nationalism, after witnessing a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was neutralised by the first PPP regime (led by a Sindhi prime minister, Z.A. Bhutto).

The Bhutto government (1971-77) became a bridge for the Sindhis to connect directly with federal-level politics and economics. The party continues to be that bridge and has thus relegated Sindhi nationalism to the fringes.

NAP was a left-leaning platform shaped in 1957 by radical Bengali, Baloch, Pakhtun and Sindhi nationalists. It won majorities in KP and Balochistan during the 1970 election. In 1971 the party lost its Bengali dimension after the East Pakistan debacle. The party was banned in 1975 by the Bhutto regime (on charges of ‘treason’ and ‘militancy’). The decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. NAP re-emerged in 1979 as the National Democratic Party (NDP) but it too was banned, this time by the reactionary Zia dictatorship. In 1986 it was reborn as ANP. However, by the 1988 election, ANP had become an entirely Pakhtun nationalist entity, when its Sindhi and Baloch leadership broke away.

This was mainly due to two factors: First, the Baloch nationalists had begun to conceive the Pakhtuns as part of the country’s political and economic elite that had nothing in common any more with the Baloch. On the other hand, the PPP had already relegated Sindhi nationalism. So Sindhi nationalists in ANP weren’t major players anymore as they had been in NAP. Secondly, apart from the post-1960s’ ‘mainstreamisation’ of the Pakhtuns, Pakhtun nationalism also struggled to survive the rise of religious militancy (among the Pakhtuns) encouraged by the state during the Zia dictatorship.

So ANP drastically refigured its ethno-nationalist narrative. By the mid-2000s it had evolved Pakhtun nationalism from being a radical left and quasi-separatist expression (NAP) to become a federalist left-liberal Pakhtun endeavour.

So Khattak’s radical rhetoric must have raised eyebrows in the ANP camp as well. Friend and fellow columnist, Fasi Zaka, a proud Pakhtun, recently related to me the concern of an old Pakhtun nationalist. He told me that the gentleman exhibited anxiety over the fate of the new generation of young Pakhtuns with the rise of PTI in KP.

The concerned man was of the view that Pakhtun nationalism had taken a pragmatic route from the late 1980s onward to sustain the ethnic group’s increasing ‘mainstreamisation’ and to neutralise religious militancy which was encouraged among young Pakhtuns by a dictatorship. But with the rise of PTI in KP, another generation was galvanised by radical postures. The man agreed that these were more promising than the ones triggered by religious militancy, but with the failure of many PTI initiatives in KP, the same generation will be left feeling frustrated and angry. This will leave them vulnerable to the designs of those hell-bent on using nihilistic action for various theological and anti-democratic causes.

Maybe this concern too drove Khattak to use a bygone Pakhtun nationalist rhetoric: to placate the emotions of Pakhtun youth that were stirred by the PTI but now are becoming difficult to navigate.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 13th, 2016