IN CASE you’ve been avoiding the news, there is a mass gathering in Gujranwala today that will have our intrigue-obsessed TV-watching public on tenterhooks. On the surface of it, there can only be two positions in what has shaped up as yet another sensational battle for power. If you support the PTI government and the security establishment that ostensibly continues to back it, the opposition is irredeemably corrupt and the Nawaz Sharifs and Asif Zardaris of the world are a threat to national security. If you are partial to the recently formed Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), then ‘youthful’ leaders like Maryam Nawaz and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari are the answer, committed to dispensing with both the ‘selectors’ and the ‘selected’.

Reading between the lines, there are multiple sub-themes that the political and media mainstream will not broach; this would be to transcend the entrenched practice of caricaturing politics and politicians. We can only undertake limited interrogation of what Hamza Alavi famously called the ‘overdeveloped’ permanent state apparatus, and its attendant ideology of ‘national security’, or how class, gender, class, religion and ethnicity actually operate in the nooks and crannies of society. A perpetually dumbed down intellectual mainstream is, after all, a central pillar of the establishment’s carrot-and-stick model of domination.

As it is, most subordinate class Pakistanis are invested in status quo politics no matter what. Working people’s lives do not stand to change substantially on account of the wranglings at the highest echelons of power, but they have to be concerned by it all because they are ensconced in networks of power and privilege as dependents of powerful benefactors. To get and keep employment, to survive the excesses of the thana, katcheri and patwari, and simply to maintain some dignity, working class Pakistanis ingratiate themselves with the rich and powerful, and therefore accede to the logic of mainstream politics.

Practically speaking, then, a change in government matters to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder primarily to the extent that it affects their chosen benefactors at the micro level. For legislators, this means that constituency-level concerns are of primary importance. All of which is to say that actually changing structures of power — militarised, classed, gendered, racialised — is generally not even a part of the conversation.

More popular unrest can be expected.

The opposition parties gathering in Gujranwala today are supposedly acknowledging their past mistakes and calling to account the unelected bankers, generals, judges, and property moguls that actually rule. But what do they have to say about the patronage-based order that has been largely unchallenged since the regime of Gen Zia? Nawaz Sharif and the increasingly urbanised political entrepreneur he represented, let us not forget, was the primary beneficiary of the Zia years.

Punjab was never a monolith, but some would argue that the anti-establishment narrative that exists in the dominant province today is novel. Critical discourse in Punjab has certainly deepened. But is the PML-N committed to long-term change? Will it again pass repressive laws like Peca and bulldoze katchi abadis if it comes back to power?

The PTI has happily adopted the role of cheerleaders of the establishment since taking the reins. Meanwhile, its persistent claim to be dismantling the patronage-based political order — propagated most of all by a younger generation of relatively affluent Pakistanis that came of age under the regime of post-Cold War globalisation — has given way to a different incarnation of the ‘traditional’ politics it promised to transcend. Basi­c­ally, the relative aff­­l­­­u­­­ence of these PTI ‘ideologues’ prevents them from acknowledging class, or ethnic privilege, or the confluence of patriarchy with these other fault lines.

In the final analysis, the PDM may or may not put up a more intense fight with the establishment. But that is not the only indicator of democratic credentials. What about the Bundal and Buddo islands and the ecologically and federally destructive model of ‘development’ more generally? Are Baloch students protesting on the roads and GB’s prisoner of conscience Baba Jan an afterthought? And will any of our mainstream parties stand up to the neoliberal dictates of the IMF?

No one should be under any illusion that the pandemic’s economic effects are still playing out; thousands of government employees on the streets of Islamabad two weeks in a row bear this out. More popular unrest can be expected as class and other deprivations intensify. If there is some bark in the anti-establishment bite of our ‘real’ democrats, they will have to take a stand for the 99 per cent. If not, expect yet more speculative discussions at roadside tea stalls, in middle-class drawing rooms, and government offices about a game of musical chairs with no end in sight.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2020