The Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) has come to be a vehicle of the youthful, tech-savvy political subject disillusioned with ‘democratic’ institutions of mass representation in the neoliberal present. The experience of the PTI can be extrapolated to many parallel postcolonial contexts where a youthful and digitally connected demographic imbued with middle-class aspiration forms the vocal support base of a reactionary coalition that claims to break the monopoly of ‘dominant elites’. In fact, the reactionary coalition is heavily reliant on entrenched networks of patronage that undergird political, financial, and religious establishments.
The neoliberal developmental regime inaugurated by the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf spawned an idealised middle-class subject that subsequently became the motor force of the PTI. Following Musharraf’s ouster in 2008, an already substantial cult of personality around Imran Khan metamorphosed into an establishment-backed political coalition that eventually acquired governmental power in 2018.
In its genesis, the PTI brought together Imran Khan’s considerable network of personal admirers, particularly amongst relatively affluent members of the Pakistani diaspora. The latter contributed generously from the late 1980s to Khan’s cancer hospital initiative, his charity work buttressing his mystique amongst socially liberal segments with an avowed distaste for politics.
In due course, Imran Khan’s personality cult enveloped younger generations too. The fledgling PTI became the first political party in Pakistan to digitise both its recruitment process as well as its public message, boasting 10 million members both within Pakistan and across the global diaspora by 2013. An insider who later departed the fold described it as a catch-all ‘social movement’ which attracted otherwise dormant political subjects from within the ‘urban middle-class…who had never before voted and who had always seen politics as a dangerous and futile endeavour especially within the context of Pakistan’s constituency-based, patronage-heavy electoral system’.
To take but one example: women and girls from relatively affluent backgrounds were given access to Pakistan’s otherwise heavily male-dominated public sphere through PTI’s public rallies, thereby confirming the lineage between Imran Khan’s government-in-waiting and General Pervez Musharraf’s regime; both boasted overwhelming support of consumption and entertainment-hungry liberal segments avowedly committed not only to breaking the hold of ‘corrupt politicians’ but also spearheading Pakistani society’s quest for what Musharraf, under the backdrop of the so-called ‘war on terror’, had called ‘enlightened moderation’.
Yet, it was not just relatively affluent, urban liberals that coalesced under the PTI umbrella. A more vernacular element with origins in the working-class and peasantry was also mobilised across various developmental geographies. Most significantly, the PTI secured its first victory at the ballot box in war-torn Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in the 2013 general election. While the party exploded into the spotlight as a viable electoral contender after a mass rally in Lahore in October 2011, it needed time to attract entrenched ‘electables’ into its ranks to secure a countrywide electoral victory. It did enough to win governmental power in KP province in 2013, discursively mobilising significant numbers of young people around slogans of ‘change’ in the province’s most developed and politically influential region of the Peshawar Valley.
On the surface, the PTI’s campaign in KP projected the party as a ‘third force’ to traditional political elites in a region brutalised by the ‘war on terror’. The seeming inability and/or unwillingness of established political parties, including the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), to both break with entrenched logics of patronage and articulate a consistent anti-war position, was crucial in this regard. In fact, the PTI’s electoral victory in KP was due to the machinations of the state’s security apparatus as much as anti-incumbency amongst war-torn populations. That Imran Khan and his motley crew of supporters were nonetheless able to depict themselves as challengers to the ‘elite’ speaks to the growing importance of a digitalised field of politics within a youthful demographic easily moved by empty signifiers.
In general, the PTI and Imran Khan have consolidated the militarised, financialised, and globalised capitalist order to which all regimes after the Musharraf dictatorship also pledged allegiance. Take, for instance, the almost fantastical scheme initiated by the PTI government on the northern outskirts of metropolitan Lahore. Named the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project, the project envisions the construction of a planned city over a period of 30 years, catering to a population in excess of 10 million spread out over more than 100,000 acres of land. On paper, this would make it the second-biggest planned city in Pakistan, after the federal capital Islamabad. The project ostensibly caters to organic demand for ‘development’ that is unattainable within Lahore’s existing spatial make-up.
In practice, the project is a boon for real estate investors and developers, both within and outside Pakistan. The project’s stipulated purpose of ameliorating population pressure, and regenerating exhausted ecosystems is, quite simply, an eyewash. A dubious Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report commissioned by the government in 2019 served the purpose of ‘green-washing’ the subsumption of 80,000 acres of arable agricultural land and irreparable loss of flora, fauna and existing habitats.
The claims of planners that the project will facilitate regeneration of the Ravi River and its tributary ecosystems along the 46 km of planned project construction are completely outlandish. Water flows in the Ravi Basin have been nominal for decades; the river originates in neighbouring India, its control accorded to the latter under the terms of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. The project envisages the building of three barrages to artificially maintain water levels in and around Lahore city, as well as a link canal to transfer water from the Chenab River to the west. Aside from the impact of such damming, how the transfer of water away from the Chenab will affect farming in agricultural plains further west is unspecified.
The construction of wastewater treatment plants is also projected to contribute to sustainable water flows. Over the past two decades, the quality of water in the Ravi has deteriorated so much that the river can now effectively be considered a sewage drain. It is noteworthy that no Pakistani governing regime has hitherto constructed wastewater treatment plants to serve working-class residents living in the inner city near the Ravi.
The announcement of the project in 2020 engendered an immediate backlash from the thousands of farming families whose lands will be forcibly acquired for the project. Yet the portents are clear; as with so many other such ‘developmental’ projects, colonial statutes like the 1894 Land Acquisition Act are being mobilised to steamroll any meaningful resistance. A governmental body with extraordinary powers, the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA), has been incorporated to see the project to fruition. Despite legal hurdles and resistance to the project – some was initially triggered by a ‘public consultation’ as part of the EIA – combinations of coercion and financial compensation will likely clear the way for its execution.
The Baloch, Pashtun, Sindhi, Siraiki, Gilgit-Baltistani and other ethnic peripheries have always been ruled through unashamedly colonial legal and administrative modalities. Since the onset of the ‘war on terror’, the footprint of the state’s coercive apparatus in these peripheries has in fact grown, while grabs of land, water, forests, and minerals have reached epidemic proportions. Under the PTI, colonial modalities were increasingly extended to the Punjabi core as well.
Despite this, the PTI continued to depict itself as a challenger to ‘elite dominance’ while deploying idioms of ‘revolution’ and ‘change’. As in other parts of the world, such largely digitalised rhetoric has not undermined complex structures of power in Pakistan. Juxtaposed upon this is the fact that most young people in Pakistan participate in the digital lifeworld as commodity consumers; their politics, then, at best conforms to what is known globally as ‘woke’ culture. The whims of ‘wokeness’ are exemplified most in the manner that protagonists can become part of ‘troll armies’ to drown out oppositional voices. In Pakistan, the PTI is not alone in mobilising ‘troll armies’ from amongst youthful populations. Other parties like the PML-N and PPP who have constituted the ‘extreme centre’ for most of the neoliberal interregnum also dedicate considerable energy and resources to retrogressive online mobilisations. The religious right also widely deploys digital technology to expand its support base.
Postscript: This is an excerpt from Aasim Sajjad’s book entitled The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons, published by Pluto Press (London) in April 2022.
The sequence of events since the ouster of the PTI government through the vote of no confidence in April 2022 has both brought the party’s social base into the spotlight and confirmed the rupture in the PTI’s previously consensual relationship with Pakistan’s dominant military establishment. The digitalised youth that spearheaded the ‘hybrid regime’ are now facing up to the wrath of the establishment which has apparently discarded Imran Khan like so many other bourgeois political leaders. That this rupture is most evident in the heartland of military power – Punjab – represents an opportunity, however small, for left-progressives to deepen the consciousness of the youthful political subject and articulate a popular and transformative project that genuinely challenges state, class, gendered, and ethnic-national structures of power.
The writer is an author and teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
