Fattening the tiger: how to lose an election

Prime Minister Imran Khan. Looks like it.

Unless of course, the PTI’s tiring and increasingly nervous chairman and his merry band of paradoxically status quo reformers get in their own way, shoot themselves in the foot, self-sabotage, self-destruct and/or implode. Which is likely to happen.

It’s happening now. There was never a better chance for the PTI to come to power, for Imran to become prime minister and unleash his transformative policies across Pakistan, having allegedly already transformed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The point is to win the prime minister’s office, the point then is to win parliament, which means winning Punjab. A rag-tag coalition can then be assembled, at the very least, and Imran can finally be prime minister. Punjab by the way has never looked so vulnerable. With Nawaz Sharif’s war with the institutions scaring away parliamentarians from the PML-N by the dozens, and a virtually non-existent Peoples Party in the province, the vacuum in Punjab is immense. And it gets even easier for the PTI to fill the vacuum considering all those abandoning loyalties to their former parties are almost exclusively fleeing to the welcoming abode of Imran Khan. The PTI has swelled up significantly right before the election with aspiring legislators fighting it out for coveted PTI tickets. The same thing happened in 2013. With election fever running high, Imran was able to command massive popularity in a political arena often unwelcoming to new entrants. This of course attracted a significant part of the political elite to the PTI in the run-up to the election in 2013. Imran, however, lost the election.

This time around then, Imran is banking on a different kind of entrant to his party. The electable. An electable is a sure shot winner. The favourite in the election race. The candidate with the sterling political resumé, an unwavering support base and a muddled ideological allegiance allowing the candidate to tip-toe across the political spectrum. Imran, it seems, is wary of the PTI’s underdog pedigree, of its Pakistan cricket-esque, mercurial nature, where one minute it’s down and the next minute it’s up, opting instead for more certainty, surety, for being the favourite. Simply put, Imran doesn’t want the tiger to be wounded anymore (for those unaware, this is a reference to Imran’s continued obsession with the image of a wounded tiger, first with the Pakistan cricket team and now with the PTI. The wounded tiger is a metaphor for the underdog-esque pedigree that Imran has appreciated, until now.) Little surprise then that he is surrounding himself with not wounded, but healthy tigers this time around (for the also uninitiated, this is a reference to the PML-N’s logo of a healthy, thriving tiger).

As what were presumably, old party loyalists (wounded tigers) recently gathered outside Imran’s residence in Bani Gala, protesting the awarding of tickets to new entrants to the party at the expense of old loyalists, Imran laid bare his strategy for winning the election. “Electables,” he claimed, were vital to a triumph at the polls. Imran reportedly claimed that this time around tickets were to be awarded to those “who know the science of contesting elections, because change cannot be brought without winning the elections. So [the] first priority is to win the elections.” What Imran really meant through the eloquent “science of contesting elections” quip was this: Let’s get the squarely status quo electable to win the election, and then we can concentrate on the party’s original appeal of upending the status quo, by relying on a parliament full of electables, from the status quo. Basically riding the status quo electable wave to power and then relying on a parliament full of status quo supporters to validate a revolution against the very system they helped create. Not the most well thought-out strategy, one would say. No wonder the protests turned violent after hearing this.

And it’s not just the protesters who noticed, the electorate noticed too. In what was evident in viral videos across social media, Imran’s “electables” have sparked a severe backlash amongst party ranks. Even previous supporters of the electable have been seen to question their allegiance to these politicians given their performance over the years. Party veterans argue the new entrants, who were previously rivals, act to undermine the party’s ideology simply by their presence in the party, considering especially that the PTI’s mandate was reforming and replacing the status quo. At the same time, the same veterans, as considered by Imran, lack in their “electability” when compared to the new entrants.

The problem that Imran faces now is that of a surety paradox.

While the new electable entrants offer the PTI supposed surety in consolidating parliament, they simultaneously act to erode the party’s ideology as pointed out by party veterans, perhaps even enough to drastically change the character of the party and undermine its organic support base, thereby risking defeat and nullifying the earlier surety. The Chairman therefore finds himself between a rock and a hard place. In his bid to gain surety of winning the elections by relying on new electable entrants, Imran may just undermine the same surety as the PTI’s supporters see the fallacy in Imran’s strategy. Hence, the paradox.

How did Imran react to the paradox?

Nervous knee-jerk reactions. In a sombre reminder of the PTI’s self-destructive tendency, Khan reverted his decision to allot tickets to new “electables,” a day after announcing an election campaign strategy based on these very electables, and less than a month before the polls take place. After this, confusion will follow. Having doubled down on his electables strategy, or at the very least having made exceptions to the same, Khan has risked shattering the confidence of these electables with respect to their place in the PTI. At the same time, veteran loyalists of the PTI are not sure just how far to push Khan and how far he will bend to the demands of those ignored in the ticket allotment process by the PTI.

On a macro level what has transpired is the undermining of the PTI as a front runner, which it most certainly was. Far from quickly capitalising on the various retreats by rivals and filling up the vacuum in Punjab, the PTI today stands dazed and confused, with all the tools to win an election, but no certainty as to how to strategically employ these tools. Once again, the party has chipped away at its success by stumbling on its own foot. In his quest to base his political success on electables, Imran may have just risked the PTI losing its status as an electable party as a whole. The last thing the PTI needed right now is confusion and uncertainty amongst its ranks as to how to win a most certainly winnable election.

Prime Minister Imran Khan then? I wouldn’t bet on it, unless Imran decides to stop undermining himself. Will Imran stop undermining himself? I wouldn’t bet on that either.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 29^th, 2018.

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