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NAWAZ Sharif’s journey down GT Road, which reached a frenetic Lahore on Saturday, was an expensive and cumbersome way of answering question marks surrounding his immediate political future.
While the crowds weren’t as big as some of the party’s loyalists are claiming, they provided an adequate answer to why there’s an N in PML-N. Nawaz may be a leader adept at the kind of transactional politics that has allowed him to lead a party full of ambitious elites (both traditional landlords and newly minted businessmen), but he has also achieved a degree of popularity that gives him moral-democratic authority over all those egos.
Nawaz’s popularity is not the same as Imran Khan’s. The most vocal of Imran’s supporters will claim that Khan’s appeal is based on the logical or ‘objective’ evaluation of what’s beneficial for the country. He is non-corrupt, he has no desire to appropriate public office for his own gain, and he is in politics solely for the right reasons.
The case for Imran is persuasive along these lines. Even the most vociferous of his critics would have to think twice before creating equivalences between him and other career politicians in Pakistan.
Nawaz’s popularity, or the popularity of a Nawaz-type politician, among a core set of voters will stay for the foreseeable future.
However, that they still do speaks more for the fact that political preferences or behaviour are never based on neatly constructed rationalities. Our likes and dislikes in any domain — aesthetic, political, or material — are the congealed and often messy outcome of socialisation through life experiences. These innate dispositions, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu labelled our ‘habitus’, give us our gut responses to the situations we confront. We like a particular politician beyond their manifesto because something they do, say, or act out resonates with these deeply held dispositions.
At different times during these last three decades, Nawaz Sharif has managed to tap into the dispositions of a sizeable segment of voters in Punjab. These aren’t just the traders and businessmen who see their obvious economic interest in supporting a party that encourages rent-seeking behaviour.
It also isn’t just the sections of the white-collar upper middle class who see him or his brother delivering aspirational infrastructure to Third World cities. It includes vast swathes of lower middle class people who perceive him to be the right kind of ‘moral’ — the khandaani conservative or traditionalist who carries an adequate familiarity with the dispositions and practices of plebs, but is clearly rich, powerful and distant enough to be leading them.
Hence disqualified or not, Nawaz’s popularity, or the popularity of a Nawaz-type politician, among a core set of voters will stay for the foreseeable future.
What happens to the party though if Nawaz is finally eliminated? When it was first announced, quite a few people railed against Shahid Khaqan Abbasi’s ‘interim’ status. They argued Nawaz’s disqualification gave the PML-N an opportunity to move away from its dynastic core. By vesting faith in a non-Sharif, it would allow the party to professionalise itself and develop organisational depth. This would come in handy for the party if the NAB cases along with the Hudaibya Paper Mills scam ended the Sharif family’s presence in politics.
Now that the date to file election nomination papers is over, and it is apparent that neither Abbasi nor Shahbaz Sharif are moving, it begs asking if the PML-N can actually survive as a party without Nawaz in office.
A close observer of politics in Pakistan, and a fellow writer on these pages, Tahir Mehdi, gave what seemed to be the most persuasive analysis yet. He says the PML-N as a party type, if not the party itself, will survive beyond Nawaz, Shahbaz, or any of the Sharifs. This isn’t because the party has developed strong internal institutions that will ensure longevity. That hasn’t happened in three decades and it won’t happen in the next couple of years either.
Instead, it will survive in some form or the other because the PML-N has, just by being around in politics for three decades, both tapped into and developed a preference for a particular kind of leadership that Nawaz currently encapsulates. Alongside this, it has created stakes in the political system for a large section of Punjab’s population. In particular, the rapidly growing Punjabi elite and traditional middle classes that have backed Nawaz Sharif repeatedly will always need representation. Barring some major shock to the system, this representation will take place through the edifice of a political party.
To date, the PTI, now in its seventh year of national contention, has failed to break away enough support from the PML-N. People are still willing to create justifications for supporting Nawaz Sharif, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time. Contrary to popular belief, all of these aren’t bought voters or even voters tied to stifling relations of patronage. The continued appeal of Nawaz is both the Punjabi propertied classes controlling their stake in the system, and the common urban Punjabi voter exhibiting a preference for a particular kind of moral leadership.
The twin forces of material interest and moral appeal that currently sustain Nawaz Sharif’s politics over Imran Khan’s in Punjab will also be why the democratic system will face few issues moving past his accountability trial and potential conviction. Nawaz may survive or he may not, the fact is that at some point in the future his career in politics would have ended regardless. There will be a struggle to replace the position he occupies, and whether it’s within his family or between different leaders in his party is largely immaterial in the long run. What will matter is that both those in Punjab who seek to protect their interest through politics and those who wish to see a particular kind of politics will ultimately find their own leader, just as they first found and then rediscovered Nawaz.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2017
