[Dawn] WHEN Imran Khan... aka
Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five...
launched the Pakistain Tehrik-i-Insaf in 1996, then prime minister Benazir Bhutto rhetorically asked, "Can Imran win 51 per cent seats in parliament to form a government?"
A decade and a half later, the same question haunts Mr Khan even when he has gathered together the largest public assembly of his entire political life. His supporters, critics and opponents are asking if he will ever get the parliamentary strength he needs to realise his aspirations of becoming prime minister.
There are, indeed, genuine reasons for scepticism. First, the nature of his politics and the political character of his supporters are such that transforming his public support into electoral success will be a challenging task. Second, the quality of his prospective, and previous, election candidates leaves much to be desired, and lastly, his political agenda is so briefly simplistic that it runs the risk of having a limited appeal for most voters in the country.
Mr Khan's inaugural political plank in 1996 was that all politics and all politicians are bad, and so it remains today. This leaves him very little room for the alliance-making and deal-cutting that bring people to power in Pakistain and help them throw their opponents out of it. His is, in fact, anti-politics -- an ideology that discredits what he calls "professional politics" in order to replace it with, you guessed it, politics.
For many years before he took part in the 1997 general election as the head of his nascent PTI, he was confused about whether he wanted to launch a movement for social reform, create a pressure group for weeding the bad stuff out of politics or launch a political party.
What he came up with in the end was a cross between a social movement, a think tank and a loosely organised collection of highly educated technocrats and avowed Islamists.
Having propagated an anti-politics credo, Mr Khan ensured from the start that he repelled more voters than he attracted.
Those who voted for a party or a candidate because they needed help in bending, bypassing or even violating the complex, corrupt and ineffective administrative and legal structures of the state would always hesitate to vote for him or his candidates.
And such 'bad' voters have been in the majority -- at least until now.
The political appeal of his anti-politics therefore remained limited to educated and young professionals who would defeat the average elected politician hands down in a battle of IQ, knowledge, understanding or articulation. To his advantage, this section of society has increased phenomenally in numbers over the last 15 years.
This is Pakistain's emerging middle class comprising professionals -- bankers, doctors, engineers, techies, media persons, managers, advertisers, accountants, et al. -- that has benefited enormously from the privatisation of education and the economy in the 1990s and the expansion of private enterprise and the service sector in the 2000s.
That the parties and professional groups representing the political ideology of this class boycotted the 2008 election meant that the beneficiaries of its maiden political activism were the same politicians that it abhorred. With Mr Khan's Oct 30 rally, this middle class is only coalescing on one platform and coming out against politics and politicians to conclude the unfinished revolution that started in 2007.
Biggest unknown
But even when it came out in the thousands to listen to Mr Khan speak at the Minar-i-Pakistain, its next step remains uncertain. With its well-recorded hatred for elections and the ballot box, will it take the trouble to cast a vote -- something it has done only sparingly in the past? That is perhaps the biggest unknown in Pak politics today, and it is the answer to this question that will determine the extent of Mr Khan's success, or failure, at the polls.
Two factors will be vital to the answer: his decision about making alliances or becoming part of a rightwing conglomerate reportedly already in the making, and the quality of his candidates. Having discredited every political party in the country, Mr Khan has left himself almost no space to backtrack on what he never tires of brandishing as the core principle of his politics -- no compromises for electoral success. The moment he utters the word 'alliance' he will start losing support.
On the second count, Mr Khan may already be faltering. Many of his previous and prospective candidates offer a stark contrast to his and his supporters' antipathy towards family-based politics. Some also represent the antithesis of his anti-politics ideology -- they are professional politicians who have changed loyalties in the past and have unenviable political track records.
Two of his main people in KP are Iftikhar Jhagra and Khwaja Khan Hoti. Both are the scions of political dynasties in their areas and both carry political baggage, including shifting political allegiances, that may not measure up to the great expectations Mr Khan's core supporters harbour.
In Punjab, his choice of candidates is even more suspect. In a by-election in Lahore last year, for example, he gave his party's ticket to one Mian Hamid Meraj, whose influential local family is in the business of politics mainly because they have biradri vote banks in some parts of the city.
A recent entrant in the PTI from Lahore is Mian Azhar, governor of Punjab when Nawaz Sharif
... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
was prime minister in the 1990s before the two had a falling-out. After Gen (retd) Pervez
PervMusharraf
... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ...
took over, Mr Azhar was the head of the Pakistain Moslem League-Likeminded -- the first batch of League people who opted to side with the military ruler. And Mian Mehmoodur Rashid, Mr Khan's most ardent supporter in Lahore, was one of the few Islami Jamhoori Ittehad candidates in Lahore who survived a PPP onslaught in the 1988 election.
In 1990, he again won a seat from the city for the Punjab Assembly from Jamaat's quota in the Sharif-led alliance. Others, including Zaheer Abbas Khokhar, Rasheed Bhatti, and Farooq Amjad Mir, have moved from party to party before settling on PTI as their current home.
So here is the question: Will supporters of the PTI vote for such political weathercocks in their search for a change in the political culture of the country? If they will, the party's promised revolution will be suffocated under the burden of its own candidates and the winners' ambition for power. That some earlier passengers on the PTI bandwagon soon left in disillusionment may well mean that some current supporters are headed in the same direction when they find out that the quality of the candidates from their 'pro-change', 'clean' party is as low as it can get in Pak politics.
The last critical factor of Mr Khan's politics is his agenda. When he started off in 1996, his catchphrases were brown sahib, VIP culture, political corruption, accountability before election, fatal dependence on foreign loans and subservience to the United States. His proposed remedies were supposed to be elaborate and prepared by eight committees of technocrats with vast expertise and experience in various fields.
Many years later, he remains high on rhetoric and low on reality. His hobbyhorses continue to be the same, but his solutions have become more basic and irrelevant than ever before: politicians declaring their 'real' assets; court reform; thorough accountability without fear or favour; local government with, surprise, surprise, elected sheriffs at the local level; an end to patwaris and the digitisation of land records (something already underway in some districts in Punjab with rather mixed results); the declaration of an education emergency; bringing Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
into the national mainstream -- it's simple, isn't it?
-- by holding meetings with disgruntled Baloch politicians; and the much-talked-about end to thaana culture.
If some people find disconcerting similarities between these solutions and Gen Musharraf's agenda after he overthrew Mr Sharif's government, they only need to understand that both play to the same gallery of middle class professionals in the anti-politics brigade.