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THIS is neither about principles nor about the politics of pragmatism. This is a power struggle, pure and simple. One person has the power and the other one wants it. The other one says and does whatever he can (in this case since both are men, there is no need for gender neutrality in language) to strip the other of power and take it for himself. Once you realise that, and truly internalise its meaning, you see how little many of the terms being invoked to justify one or the other position really mean.
There are two courts at play here: the court of law and the people’s court. One party has prevailed in one court, so the other is leveraging his strength in the other court to build his position. The proximity of the elections is the key here. If the N League returns with a heavy mandate after the elections, it will have an opportunity to turn to everybody else, particularly the PTI, and say ‘hun das?’ (‘now what?’)
And one cannot, should not rule that possibility out. Elections are strange creatures and it is a tricky game to try and forecast their outcome based on one’s ‘gut feeling’. One poll done in heavily contested constituencies by the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives in Lahore found that “[t]hirty-two per cent of potential voters remain undecided”.
Never underestimate the paradoxes of democratic politics. Never underestimate how large this field really is.
So the big question at the moment is actually this: what is the voter’s assessment of the PML-N’s chances of victory following the disqualification of Nawaz Sharif? This is neither a principled question, nor a strictly pragmatic one. If anything, it is a supremely opportunistic question, much like the Punjab voter. On this question will hinge the endgame of this whole affair, not on how well the technicalities of the disqualification order are debated by one side or the other, and not on how sadiq and ameen the party leadership is on either end.
And on this question, the jury has not even been assembled, let alone begun to decide. The disqualification and the long march currently under way, the fourth since a former chief justice made the same journey following his dismissal by Musharraf, are both just dust thrown up by the struggle whose end will be decided by factors far beyond courts orders and the legal debates that they kicked off.
A large part of the answer to the question will hinge on the candidates fielded by either party in each constituency. Those who think the narratives debated in TV talk shows decide elections forget that in parliamentary systems, the voter sees the candidate first and the party second. To some extent, the PPP managed to skirt this rule, but by 2013 the party’s own appeal and the sacrifices of its leadership were no longer able to bear electoral fruit.
Then there is the material circumstances obtaining in the country at the time of polling: widespread load-shedding, rampant dollarisation and galloping inflation can aggravate an anti-incumbency bias. With a large number of undecided voters already in the field, and perceptions in a flux following the disqualification, and the economy beginning to run short on the vital macroeconomic fuel needed to ensure basic stability on the surface in a year’s time, there could well be some swing in the elections. But it is nowhere near a foregone conclusion at this point in time.
Those people insisting that there is a play of morality here, please consider a little history. We have heard this tale of accountability far too often now to take it seriously anymore. None other than Nawaz Sharif himself argued, after his return from exile and the elections of 2008, that he was following a politics of principles. Remember his position in the restoration of the judges, or in the debates around the NRO? That was quintessentially the pragmatic vs principled politics debate, and his victory back then has become a thorn in his side today.
Today, it is his party arguing for a politics of pragmatism while the PTI has inherited the mantle of principles. But even the great Khan is not immune from the tides of inevitability that sway politics. Remember when he used to glorify the early years of Musharraf as the perfect moment in Pakistan’s politics? Politics was held in abeyance and technocrats ran the ship of state, he used to say. That’s what he wanted, to bring the curtain down on politics altogether.
Then came the inevitable participation in the game as elections approached. So his party went to the electorate, in 2013, asking for the vote and promising a ‘tsunami’. But then another prickly question was posed to him: with whom would he form a coalition if his seat share was short of the majority needed to form a government? His response: nobody.
He will not sit in a coalition with any of the parties because they are all corrupt, all tainted, and he has not come to play in the game of politics, but to stand athwart it, to end it and subsume its complexities into his simple, formulaic brand of born-again leadership.
Today, we see the same party fielding Sheikh Rashid as its candidate for prime minister after the disqualification of Nawaz Sharif, standing shoulder to shoulder on the containers with Chaudhry Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi, playing a video of Pervez Musharraf praising its leader at a rally marking its biggest triumph yet.
Yes, never underestimate the paradoxes of democratic politics. Never underestimate how large this field really is, how empty the words, how feeble the deeds and how vast the multitude that eventually sits in judgement. Never forget that the road of politics is endless, there is no endpoint. Above all, more than winning, the game is about survival, and survival is a brutal beast that feeds on the virtues of the pretender.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2017
