Imran Khan’s battle of belonging

Give it any name; call it conspiracy or external interference in our internal matters; the fact is that it no more matters. Former prime minister Imran Khan has already built a powerful strategic narrative that is not only very popular but has also resulted in the unification of his strategic audience both at home and abroad. This strategic narrative has now acquired a national and international tone. What bothers people today is not whether the letter-gate is true or false. I think, as of today, that no more matters. What matters today for the people is to see on which side of the history they stand and what is it that they stand for. If the measure of that is not what we witnessed in the people’s gathering in Peshawar then I don’t know what else is? And this is not the end — there is Karachi on Saturday and then Lahore and so on. Let there be no doubt that Khan is riding a populist wave and riding that he has been able to easily smash the long-held people’s political predispositions and beliefs on the fairness and justness of the Pakistani political system. He promises that he will change the current system and the people believe in him.

The former PM has taken his political fight with his opponents to the ultimate decision-making platform — not a legal, institutional and constitutional platform but a people’s platform. And on that platform, he is winning the battle even with his hands tied behind his back. What Khan has initiated is a battle of belonging in Pakistan. A battle fighting which the people have to decide which kind of Pakistan they want to associate with and belong to — a Pakistan which is sovereign and in which the prime minister and Parliament are supreme; and not a Pakistan that gets dictated by powers from outside; a Pakistan where the other institutions of the state serve the policy and not manipulate, drive and direct it by creating comfort zones for policy manipulation and opening courts on holidays and midnights to diffuse the actual sovereign’s power — the Prime Minister. People no more want a Pakistan where everyone is fooled to accept artificial realities based not only on unsound judgments but political jugglery and comedy. If Khan is calling the current social contract that binds people with the state a fraud committed by the rich against the poor then people are willing to listen to him. If he is telling them that they were born free but it is the system that is keeping them chained then they are believing in him. With about 125 MNAs resigning from the parliament the general will of the people has already switched from the parliament out to the roads and the streets. The bottom line is that the remaining elected representatives in the parliament only represent the partial will of the people; and the majority today is being represented out on the roads and the streets.

And must we remind ourselves that all this Imran Khan is doing by introducing in the country a new brand of nationalism — revolutionary nationalism that is designed to question the very nature and character of our state. This revolutionary nationalism is reminding people about the importance of overthrowing a non-delivering and dysfunctional system. Much like what Lenin did to overthrow the Tsarist rule in the Russian Empire. The problem with nationalism and nationalist movements is that they both unite as well as divide. Nationalisms in Pakistan have gone through many transformations. We got our country on the basis of religious nationalism but lost half of it because of linguistic nationalism which tore our nationhood apart. But the current revolutionary nationalism spurred by Khan’s ouster from power is scary. It is scary because so far it is peaceful, controlled and directed by a leader who is being very reasonable. But imagine what if this leader is punished in the foreign funding case or his legal and political status to lead his party scrapped or curbed by defanging him or cutting his wings — what would be the reaction of the people?

All sovereign and powerful institutions must correctly read the mood of the people in Pakistan. Clipping his wings won’t matter at all now because he has awakened a nationalist spirit in the people. He has told them that “you were born with wings why to prefer to crawl through life?” and they believe him.

Undoubtedly, since Khan’s ouster from power a spirit of intense patriotism has engulfed this country. It was Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian, who defined patriotism as “not for the nation you love but the nation you are ashamed of”. The present circumstances of our country’s politics are taking us to the point where people now clearly understand and approve of what constitutes national shame. Personally, I think there is good news in this as people must wake up to national imperfections as only then they would be able to choose and vote for the right rulers to govern them and through these rulers hope for remedying all these governances and societal deficiencies, failures and imperfections that fashion and generate their national shame.

People are increasingly questioning why our judicial system allows the cases of corruption to be dragged timelessly in our courts? Why the only choice with the nation of this over 230 million people is to elect a PM who has not been able to prove his innocence on charges of corruption levelled against him? Why our courts can open up at midnight on a holiday to defend the constitutional provisions under which they not only passed a ‘timed and spaced judgment’ but also never had the appropriate judicial lens to witness possible fraud initiated to gather the majority vote for no-confidence motion against former PM Imran Khan?

People are frustrated and angry and are, at this critical juncture of our history, determined to exercise loyalty to the nation as something that will now mitigate our national shame. People are also questioning the current government’s loyalty to the nation which is being determined by the actions of the government of the day. They ask how a can government be loyal to the nation if the logic of its governance is based on undermining and defeating and shutting down whatever good the previous government was doing. The current government of PM Shehbaz Sharif which is still without a cabinet and hardly four days old has already taken some decisions and actions that speak not of its love and loyalty to the country but hate and deliberate attempt to outshine the ideals of the previous government.

Two such actions are lockdown of panahgahs i.e. homeless shelters and the quashing of the Sehat Sahulat, a health service programme that was benefiting millions of people.

The us versus them syndrome, the permanent division of politics into pro-Imran and anti-Imran political camps in this country is dangerous. We will be lucky if we can stop it right here. The only way to do that is hold early elections. Else things can take an ugly turn.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2022.

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