Under the narrative knife

Status quo has to change. This perception has been shaped by the narrative Imran has been booming from his container

This Eid, many of God’s creatures will be under the knife. The government will not be among them.

Yes, the prime minister and his men have survived the scare. Tomorrow they will have plenty to be thankful for when they offer their prayers. The war is still being waged, but a bloody carnage has been spared. For now.

This is indeed a rather curious affair that we have seen unfold since August: so many players, so many possibilities, so much at stake and so much absolutely uncertain. The interregnum between the two Eids has kept the nation on tenterhooks, but a conclusion is yet nowhere in sight. So what now?

The Eid holidays will provide everyone an opportunity to take stock of the situation; perhaps, to step back and reflect on the events that have unfolded in the glare of cameras. The next few days will be an opportune time to chew on something other than just meat; to assess the wins and losses and more importantly, reflect on the prevailing mood within the country.

How does one gauge this elusive commodity known as the ‘mood’? In the absence of credible surveys or authentic polling, the only barometer to measure mood is something even more elusive: perceptions. Here’s the catch though: perceptions are formed through a combination of grounded reality and a powerful narrative that contextualises reality within a defined and desired framework. Complicated? Not really. All this means is that perceptions can be managed.

In fact, they can even be manufactured. But that is an extreme option that becomes harder as citizens become more aware. Modern political discourse — swirling around as it does inside the media blender — is aimed primarily at managing perceptions through potent narrative-building. This is what is happening all around us today.

Imran Khan whipped up the electoral rigging narrative to mobilise support for his march to Islamabad. To give wings to this narrative, he laid out sensationalist details revolving around conniving judges, crooked returning officers, suspect election commission officials, scheming caretakers, fake ballot papers and shady printing operations. This narrative was aimed at delegitimising the PML-N government and shaking the confidence of the Pakistani voter. Every time a recount took place and irregularities surfaced — which they invariably did — Imran’s narrative cemented that much more. Sure, there could be some perfectly explainable reasons for these irregularities, but nothing really mattered because the narrative had been drummed home. And yes, this did yet again prove that he who has the microphone gets to shape the narrative.



So Imran shaped it. The government could have shouted from the rooftops, but somehow, it had lost the initiative on this particular agenda. Even in the absence of any decisive evidence about a planned conspiracy to steal the election, people began to accept that something was indeed rotten in the 2013 electoral exercise. With the prime minister opting to take a vow of silence, his ministers and sundry companions just could not match the narrative deluge flowing down from the containers of Imran and Qadri. The feeble attempts to counter this blistering narrative were drowned out in the din of noise generating from D-Chowk.

But soon this electoral rigging narrative reached a saturation point. It had had the desired impact, but this impact was not forceful enough to trigger a prime ministerial resignation. That’s when Imran expanded the scope of the battle — and the narrative. The new message now was not just the laser focus on rigging, but on the need for reforming the system. This narrative grew out of the original one, but then spread out like machine gun fire across the airwaves. Imran was now demanding Nawaz’s resignation not just because he had stolen an election, but because he was simply bad for the country.

That’s a pretty simplistic way of looking at things. But it’s simplicity that makes a narrative powerful. Inject too much subtlety and shades of gray, and you will lose traction, and the audience. This expanded narrative was vague enough not to depend on any hard evidence, and broad enough to appeal to a wide cross section of society. Suddenly, people across the country, glued to their TV screens at 9.30 pm, started to nod their heads when Khan thundered against corruption, VIP culture, police excesses, lack of justice, absence of merit, and the potential of Pakistanis waiting to be unleashed. Lost in this avalanche of rhetoric was the simple question: how do you force out an elected prime minister?

But here again the power of the narrative began to shape new perceptions. Slowly and gradually, talk of constitutionalism, democracy, laws and by-laws, and even the need to protect the fragile system, all this talk began to ebb away as a fresh, powerful wave of the new narrative started hitting the citizenry. Constitutional democracy in its present form became a synonym for status quo. And status quo got equated with everything that is wrong around us. This happened so suddenly, and so stealthily, that the government never knew what hit them.

From standing smugly behind the constitutional shield, the government now found itself struggling to explain the absence of fundamental reform. The new narrative had once again birthed new and powerful perceptions, which in turn started to have a direct bearing on the political reality.

The PTI knew what it felt to lose the narrative. They did so with the Taliban policy. Whatever Khan said and whatever his supporters parroted, his pro-Taliban narrative never got traction, and never found a receptive audience. But this time around, it’s the government that is on the back foot. It has lost the narrative.

The status quo has to change. This then is the prevailing mood in Pakistan. This mood has been shaped by a perception that the current lot of rulers are responsible for the status quo. This perception has been shaped by the narrative that Khan has been booming from atop his container. Will the narrative lead to Nawaz Sharif’s ouster? Hard to say. But has the narrative changed the way we think about our country? Absolutely yes.

Without upsetting the constitutional cart, Imran has already won the battle of narratives. What he does with this victory will determine the fate of the status quo that we all now love to hate.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2014.

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