All of this is a domestic spat. Setting aside either side’s fables of victimhood, claims of legitimacy, and tales of sacrifice, this is nothing more than an over-the-top household quarrel. And the household in question has the political elite of north and central Punjab, and a few token souls from the south, as its members.

First things first though — there were two marches, two sets of vague claims, and two self-righteous revolutionaries. The gentleman from Canada, however, deserves an analytical piece of his own. I cannot possibly do justice to his audacity, nor explain the sinister manoeuvres at play that triggered this bizarre aberration to descend upon us. Some things (and individuals) are best left for other times (and other planets).

The PTI, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon, and one worthy of considerable attention. Going by events of the past week, it is eminently clear that the party, despite electoral failures of the past year, has cemented a strong position within Punjab’s political economy. That much is apparent going by the size of the crowds, the participating demographic, and the amount of money involved in this long march.

What is also clear is that this pitched battle against the PML-N government, which at the time of writing has left much acrimony and instability in the air, is moulded across an artificial divide. The difference between the two parties — despite their best efforts at distinguishing themselves from the other — boils down to a choice between two groups of urban Punjabi politicians, led by two personalities, each struggling for control of an oversized province.

The PTI’s pitched battle against the PML-N is moulded across an artificial divide

Let’s start with some history: the current incarnation of the Pakistan Muslim League emerged as urban Punjab’s manufactured alternative to the PPP during the late ’80s. For a brief period of time in the province, it became immensely popular and coherent for a host of reasons — one was the pesky legal need for a non-uniformed right-wing political voice, and the other was the wound inflicted by Z.A. Bhutto’s socio-economic agenda.

However, over the course of these last two decades, as Punjab urbanised, desired and flourished, its growing population of political elites has found it harder to coexist. Everyone is hungrier for more in what is essentially a zero-sum game. Some feel completely locked out of power, others feel they don’t have enough. Most have tasted it at some point or the other. These fissures — partially catalysed by the army, and partially surfacing and haemorrhaging themselves — have given rise to separate sets of loyalties and hierarchies. This is precisely why the PTI and PML-N appear different, even though their real, material roots are the same.

They are ethnically comparable — both draw a sizable chunk of their core leadership, and their core electorate, from the urbanised districts straddling the GT Road and M-2 in Punjab. Neither are they differentiated by class. Both are led and financed by the wealthy (and the almost wealthy), intellectually augmented by members of the conservative middle-class, and voted for by the poor and the destitute. Even ideologically, both espouse variations of the same neo-liberal populism — one that promises a heady cocktail of development and good governance, shaken with efficiency or stirred by justice.

But perhaps nothing brings these two parties closer than their inability to think of Pakistan as a federal republic — one that extends beyond Attock in the north and Rahimyar Khan in the south. The ruling party, despite attaining power in Islamabad for a third time, has shown little interest in organising itself internally and branching out into other provinces. Their organisation in Balochistan consists of an influential tribal head and his family; in Sindh, a few irrelevant fossils; and in KP, an elbowed-out elite of one Hindko-speaking division. Their relationship with the state remains fraught with insecurities and egoism; and their relationship with the federation, even now, even after all these years, oscillates between paternalistic attention and cold indifference.

Not to be left behind, the PTI matches them pound-for-pound by repeatedly stating its willingness to sacrifice their government in a smaller province for a power grab in central Punjab. Despite receiving a healthy mandate by the tired, violence-stricken population of a troubled province, its leadership continues to cast envious glances at Lahore. And while Peshawar stood still with flash flooding and heavy rain, their chief minister thought it better to protest against the results of the very election that saw him elected.

Part of this is simply because of Punjab’s weight in the national electoral calculus. You can after all power through to Islamabad by winning seven out of the nine administrative divisions in Punjab. But more than that, what these cold numbers breed and eventually sustain is a political culture that’s so completely inward-looking, and so harshly indifferent to all else, it repeatedly threatens to break the fragile edifice of democracy itself. Both the PTI and the PML-N, at different points in our recent past, have proven themselves to be proponents of this culture of indifference and entitlement.

So what we saw this past week was a particularly jarring episode of Punjab’s long-running political soap opera. The PML-N’s usage of thugs and the state machinery, and its inability to imagine political solutions provided half the plot, and the PTI’s lust for power, and failure to deal with an (surely transient) electoral loss gave the remaining script. Tragically for the rest, while these two exchange blows under the callous, provoking eye of the military establishment, the real loser is the decidedly rickety transition towards democracy, civilian supremacy and federalism.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

umairjaved@lumsalumni.pk

Twitter: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2014