Imran Khan’s politics

Of late, the PTI has struggled to keep up the potency of its various warnings of an impending tsunami. As of now, the tsunami appears to have dissipated somewhere. What has gone wrong for the party? Perhaps the answer can be found in the misalignment of objectives and strategy. The PTI is practising anti-Nawaz politics to install Imran Khan, the ‘last hope’, as prime minister with immediate effect. This is its core strategy and objective. Now the issue is that there is no harm in being anti-Nawaz, but the catch lies in the strategy being employed here.

The PTI strategy has always been embedded in making accusations against the PML-N for being the cause of the various social malaises that afflict the country without being able to present an iota of convincing evidence in this regard. In doing so, the PTI has targeted the infrastructure development activities of the PML-N although these are actually popular strategic thrusts of the ruling party. What the PML-N does for the electorate is quite visible, what they have been accused of doing isn’t all that apparent and so people remain unconvinced about the PTI’s rhetoric.



At the same time, the PTI appears to have taken a U-turn over its lambasting of the PML-N over focusing on visible infrastructure projects with announcements of the Peshawar BRT and the Swat motorway. What is the lesson here? The lesson is: Imran Khan should try to understand that one cannot do anti-Nawaz politics by harping on an anti-development narrative in Punjab. It is time for him to go back to the drawing board and reflect on his deeply wounded political strategy.

Despite rightly laying emphasis on the importance of institutions, Imran Khan’s objective only seem to discredit institutions. His strategy is to call institutions weak and their ostensible siding with the ruling party to be fraudulent. The point is that if institutions are weak, it is the politicians’ responsibility to make the needed corrections. The machine and the platform for this is parliament where legislative and accountability mechanisms are concentrated. Imran Khan fails to learn that the end of the dharna in 2014 created a strong message that the Pakistani parliament backed by the Constitution has emerged as one of the strongest and most resilient institutions of the country. What we saw was the judicial commission episode sending the PTI back to parliament.

Last but not least, the objective-strategy misalignment has shot the PTI on the foot at the alliance-making level too. The PTI emerged as a big party in the 2013 election and won power in one province, but soon started alliance-making with two ambitious political non-starters i.e., the Awami Muslim League and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek. The lesson: after some successful political muscle-flexing, pulling up laggards on your shoulders adds to fatigue and eventual collapse. And that is what we saw during the September 3 protests.



So Imran Khan and his advisers have locked themselves into a situation where the government has no fear of any government-in-waiting. How can the PTI make sure that its objectives and strategy can go in one direction? This can happen if it works seriously in parliament and focuses on faster development work in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Mr Khan, you can still steal the show if there is less of a will to listen to chants of “Imran Khan dae jalsay vich nachnay noon dil karda”.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 7^th, 2016.

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