Can Imran Khan change Pakistan?

Yes, that’s who we are looking for — someone who can set us on the way to a prosperous and a disciplined society. Imran has arrived on the Pakistani political scene, but sadly in the same league as the Sharifs and Zardari. He doesn’t seem to be, at least right now, as someone who is going to change the way politics should function in the twenty-first century. Is he, for example, aware that Pakistani politics resides in the mid-twentieth century and the attitudes and ways of the political elite may be even more archaic? Patronage, tribalism and the biradari will determine who comes up atop the political pile.

While the basics of an equally archaic, nineteenth century society are still antiquated, as are their expectations, the political elite is equally averse to pulling the naïve electorate out of their routine muddle of the thana and katchery. Since such function is easily doable and within the intellectual capacity of our political elite, in turn assuring heavy returns in the shape of electoral allegiance, all that is needed is a compliant police station head-officer (SHO), which their political clout, when in the assemblies, can easily contrive. The circus thus goes on. The police officer must also receive back his pound of flesh; and he does that through a system of gratification that the legislators are obliged to overlook. So is the case with the tehsil, district and provincial bureaucracy where honesty is a disqualifier for mainstream plum jobs. With an uninterruptible cycle of corruption now fully in place and feeding on itself for sustenance and strength, all that remains is for the original sinner, the politician, to cream off his share in this thievery at the top. But is ‘electing’ the SHO the solution? Even in England, police commissioners are from the police cadre and that is a good model to follow.

What is it that the electorate gets in addition to help with the thana and katchery for their electoral allegiance? Naukri! And what that might be? A peon, a lascar, a bearer, a government job in short, signed in hundreds by the politician when he makes his weekly return to his native constituency and attends to the piles upon piles of applications seeking recompense for their electoral duty. What does the nation get in return for this ignoble association? An overstaffed PIA; a sinking Steel Mill; a broken Railways. The list is unending, gobbling up four to five billion dollars worth of precious money that may in the first place have been begged off a world wary of our shenanigans. Return to the original sin. Who needs help at the thana and the katchery? The hustlers and the rustlers! The entire edifice is based on criminality. When you input trash, what you get at the other end is unlikely to be anything savoury.

Can Imran change this? I hope he can, because both Nawaz and Zardari won’t. There is a need to change the level of expectations of the electorate; to make them more issue sensitive; to suggest to them more sustaining avenues of a better promise in their daily lives. Imran should be honest with them. He should frequently talk to them and explain his hopefully more abiding policies that will bring to them fruits for a longer period though later in time than the immediate returns that they seek through transitory and episodic jobs at the lowest rungs, in turn making institutions untenable and inefficient. Bank loans rather than jobs will enable them better hope: India, just across the border, and Bangladesh have put in place programmes of poverty alleviation that are putting people to work where they live. Our few steps in this initiative have been rather tentative and without an institutional framework to ensure long-term efficacy.

Let’s go back to Imran’s jalsa. Like so many others, I was pleased and surprised at the number of people who attended it. More importantly, they came of their own wont and remained enthusiastic enough to give hope to a malfeasant political scene. That the young have taken to expressing their frustration is also encouraging — they remain our best hope to push this system to drastically change itself. Imran did better than the rest in enunciating something of his plan on how he intends to right the national wrongs, but remained woefully short in suggesting a fresher perspective of our ailments. It was conventional, drawn-out and boring. The last letter in PTI may stand for Insaf (justice), but it should not mean justice against corruption alone. Imran carries the flag against corruption and kudos to him for that but zeroing in on the Zardaris and the Nawazs seems a transparent case for finding political space by making both irrelevant. That is old politics. That way he will remain firmly entrenched in the same league. A useful advice to him in the last few days has been ‘to stay above the fray’; I hope he does better and carries a more wholesome view of our ills with the courage to bring structural corrections.

Imran may not be corrupt and hopefully will not be when he converts his potential into electoral gain — more of a science than an art alone — but one looks for a deeper statement to correct a corroding edifice. The structures for sure need to change; increased administrative units can devolve responsibility and authority closer to the people. This will also mitigate undue regional sensitivities, freeing the state to undertake initiatives that are put to halt simply for fear of upsetting federated order. A larger number of provinces than the present four will obviate parochial sensitivities flouted through various ‘cards’ to seek undue political advantage. The 1973 Constitution, while a veritable instrument of consensus under difficult conditions, should not become an instrument straitjacketing progressive thinking to formulate governance mechanisms that suit our needs, especially given our experience with it of four decades. It deifies the political elite and enables familial domination of politics. Imran should have the courage to challenge such entrenched manipulation of the political system.

If Imran can do all this and more, and reset Project Pakistan, this nation would like to see him leading it for as long as it will take us to realise our potential. Imran could then be the Lee Kuan Yew that we all seek.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th,  2011.