On a chilly evening in the last few days of Ramzan, I sat with a group of Pakistani men – mostly, middle-aged, middle-class, professional immigrants to Canada – in a suburb of Toronto. As we waited patiently for the last clicks of clock announcing iftar, the group turned towards the now ubiquitous topic of discussion in free time, for diasporic Pakistanis: Imran Khan’s government’s dismissal and the popular mobilisation that he had unleashed to return to power.
They – all were from the Punjab, except one – were unanimous in their declaration that he was unfairly removed from power through an internationally-planned conspiracy; that he was theirs and Pakistan’s only hope, in terms of political leadership nationally, and, internationally, for the Muslim World (they made parallels between him and Erdogan, another symbol of pan-Islamic masculine, modern leadership); that he had no self-interest at stake and was not corrupt, someone who could/will bring a ‘true revolution’ in Pakistan; and that those who opposed him were ‘stooges of the international league of conspirators, led by the corrupt military elite and the established political leadership of Pakistan.’
Their thumping unanimity on these political imaginaries was disrupted by my skepticism regarding their varied claims and hopes for a ‘real’ revolution, pinned on a populist leader who had come to power with first tacit and, later, open, support of the military elite, and had now mobilised people of Pakistan, particularly the youth and mainly the urban (but also rural and semi-rural) Pakistanis against them on a scale not seen since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rise in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The difference between the two populists, as many political commentators debate, is one of ideology and/or its absence: Bhutto’s socialist slogans of roti, kapra, makan versus the contradictory, rather vague, neoliberal cries of anti-corruption, transparency, peppered by grandiose, and notions of a Medina state.
However, these popular attachments – emotional, aspirational, national, and international – diasporic and at home and which imbibe a neoliberal religiosity aligned with a nationalist populism, shouldn’t be merely brushed aside. These notions represented in the figure of Imran Khan and his brand of populism, cannot be dismissed simply as apolitical, devoid of ‘real’ politics; rather, as Ernasto Laclau argued (2005), it is precisely this emptiness which allows populism to channel heterogenous demands.
The diversity of unfulfilled demands and how they are emotively expressed are constitutive of populism. Furthermore, and more significantly in the context of twenty-first century Pakistan, they signal the failure of existing political language to satisfactorily respond to disillusion experienced by most, but particularly young, middle-class Pakistanis, in a changed political/socioeconomic context.
This politics of middle-class and youth discontent, channeled through PTI and Imran Khan may be traced back to the mobilisation of the Lawyers’ Movement of 2007- 2009, whose primary beneficiary, politically and in the long run, was Imran Khan.
Conspiratorial interpretations reduced the Movement back then and the mobilisation today, to mechanisms set by the powerful military establishment or the deep state (a euphemism for the ideological and repressive apparatus of power lying behind the mask of the state are many); this mask has come off recently with wide-scale and open repression of dissent following the violent unrest of May 9 and the crackdown on PTI. Political agency is imparted to these shadowy powers, while denying it to the people who channeled their dissatisfaction and pursued some semblance of change, through these movements/mobilisations and the figures who led/lead them.
The Lawyers’ Movement drew its support from sections of the Pakistani urban middle-class, connected to the military or bureaucracy and from educated, professional backgrounds. Apart from their abhorrence to cycles of corruption fanned by established political parties many of them desired an ascendency of political Islam in the context of 9/11 that would respond to an American neo-imperialism that mainly targeted Muslim-majority states. This sense of humiliation was felt strongly and viscerally in the diaspora, where it took on the ugly colours of existing historical forms of racism, settler colonialism in Canada and race and colour-based racism in Canada and the US. The Islamophobia that took off soon after 9/11 is now rooted deep in North American society. The rise of white nationalism over there has only entrenched it further, legitimising it by making the figure of Muslim (niqab-cladded) as a cultural threat to the west.
On the other hand, if in the 1960s, in the heyday of Arab nationalism, Saladin Ayubi was appropriated by the Arab nationalist elite – the Egyptian state under Gamal Abdel Nasser projected him as the modern Saladin who could unite all Arab states against the threatening Zionist state backed by an imperial power – the twenty-first century response has looked towards the Ottoman empire and its glorious days. But, of course, historical appropriations of Ertugal and Saladin by populist leaders – in the context of anti-imperialism and decolonisation – inform us of those who identify with them and their proponents. But I digress.
Even though the Lawyers’ Movement’s successes and shortcomings are debatable, many argue that aside from the restoration of Chief Justice Chaudhry, which was allegedly materialised by the protest march led by Nawaz Sharif, there were no long-term effects of the Movement on the Pakistani political life. Apart from a judicial resurgence, as the higher judiciary under Chaudhry entrenched and cladded itself in a populist garb, demanding to share power with the military, the Movement’s efficacy lied in channeling the discontent with established politics and the established state. This significant long-term outcome of the Movement hasn’t been brought up or emphasised. It is that discontent which Imran Khan and his brand of unrestrained populism capitalised on years later.
Populism is generative of new political forms, no matter how shallow they may appear, and can cut across and unite diverse phenomena and groups in its political discourse. Islamic nationalism/internationalism – attachment to glories of the past as a way of articulating the hopes and failures of the present – anti-corruption narrative, that Imran Khan represents us, ‘the people’, who entered politics to clean the system, and a critique of the established state (‘the establishment’) in Pakistan, a sense of victimhood that has been understood and experienced ahistorically by Khan’s supporters, unite all these various factions. His populist appeal has, to a large extent, brought together diverse aspects of discontent felt across Pakistan.
Thus, does it matter whether PTI lives on or vanishes, with or without Imran Khan? Does death in parliamentary politics, as electable blocs and individuals desert him, means an end to PTI/Imran’s political career? It matters less whether PTI exists as a party, a notion that is already proving to be true, but what is of concern is the discontent, despair, and dissatisfaction of young Pakistanis, who for the first time in their adult lives, are witnessing the unmasking of the real state, an unmasking that was historically reserved for those Baluch, Sindhis, and Pashtuns who demanded equal rights from the Pakistani state.
The writer is a political and legal anthropologist, and a post doctoral fellow at York University, Canada.
