THE curious rumblings being witnessed on the eve of yet-to-be announced elections in Pakistan can be perceived as a game between entrenched political insiders, mainly consisting of the two major political parties, and an assorted group of politicians.

The latter has suddenly emerged on the horizon in the last year or so to challenge the current political system and the likelihood of its perpetuation for an extended period.

Since the doors of the political system are so firmly locked to any outsiders aspiring for a leadership role in it, they have no option but to storm its gates. Imran Khan’s threat to launch his tsunami over a year ago has taken rather long to gain credible momentum. Those impatient to see the end of the present coalition perhaps needed another alternative.

Had they been certain that Imran Khan’s bandwagon would roll along at a faster and more decisive pace and spell doom for the Zardari-Sharif combine, they would have allowed events to run their course. But time was of the essence and it was running out.

The priest-politician Dr Tahirul Qadri’s dramatic and sage-like entry into the political arena has, however, injected a completely new element and sent nervous reverberations down the spine of the Pakistani body politic.

His threat to lead a march on Islamabad and hold a dharna in the capital in favour of his demands for electoral reforms on Jan 14 appears to many as an open invitation for military intervention and, eventually, chaos, the doctor’s emphatic disavowal notwithstanding.

Dr Qadri’s invitation to the MQM to join the Jan 14 march and his encouragement of Imran Khan, along with the initial intent of the religious right’s Difa-i-Pakistan Council to also march on Islamabad, was alarming as well.

While exclusion by the two political behemoths has forced smaller political groups, like Imran Khan’s and Dr Qadri’s, and to a lesser extent the MQM, to make desperate bids and extravagant claims to power, the disenchantment is more general.

There is no doubt that the incumbent federal and provincial governments have added enough fuel to the raging fires of public discontent due to their indifference to the problems faced by not only the common people, but also by the articulate middle classes and other sections of the population, who feel isolated from the privileged ruling elite.

Although conspiracy theories about the ‘establishment’s role’ in the present episode of alleged derailment of the democratic system cannot be totally discounted, hopefully these looming threats will knock some sense into the heads of the quarrelling political class and make the incumbents take credible and responsive measures towards the  amelioration of the ills of the people.

The current wave of protest against a dynastic-hegemonic political system, however, does not reflect the more serious social and economic exclusion that underlies the wider political turmoil seething in the country for almost a decade.

Indeed historically, in the evolution of Pakistan’s political system, the changing configuration of political power among the elites has received much greater attention than socioeconomic exclusion.

From its very beginning, the All India Muslim League, the progenitor of the Pakistan Movement, represented only a small Muslim elite and had an exclusionary bias against the underclass, which was treated simply as a captive vote bank, a tendency that is still much in evidence.

The Muslim masses — the workers and peasants — were largely untouched by it and even scoffed at by the ashraf.

However, as the movement focused more and more on struggling educated Muslim middle classes facing stiff competition from their better (i.e. English-) educated non-Muslim rivals, the class composition of its following changed.

There was an infusion of more modest strata of society, especially the growing salariat, a term invented by Hamza Alavi, for salaried, small absentee landlords, among whom the Pakistan Movement found its vanguard.

However, after the establishment of Pakistan, more so after the creation of Bangladesh, the feudal stranglehold was back in place, notwithstanding some moderation by the brief interlude of populism during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in the Punjab under Nawaz Sharif, as well as the urban middle-class posture of the ethnically driven MQM.

The state’s resources and policy attention were also pre-empted by security concerns after the rise in militant religious fundamentalism in the wake of 9/11. A thin veneer of social policy has also been overlaid in recent decades to hide the ugly face of our socioeconomic system, largely under the influential and lucrative donor programmes, without any significant impact.

Instead of demanding a seat at the negotiating table with the powers-that-be for themselves and their parochial interests, those who really want to see Pakistan’s politically disenfranchised, economically marginalised and socially deprived population become part of the mainstream should concentrate on the excluded and on shaping a new bill of rights reflecting their aspirations.

Such a document can be a viable agenda for debate. This is unlikely to happen in the proposed conclave of Jan 14.

While no one is yet certain as to how the curtain will fall on this latest episode of the Pakistani political game and who will blow the final whistle, the people at large are likely to remain silent bystanders, as ever.

As long as that continues to happen, any hope for changing the system and ushering in a new spring is likely to remain just that.

The writer is a former professor of economics at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

smnaseem@gmail.com