Long leave from sanity

By the time you read these lines, the result of the by-election for the NA-120 seat will be out. There will be animated media debates about the causes of the victory for one party and reasons for the loss of others.

Dubbed as a referendum about people’s choices in the aftermath of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification (whose ouster led to this seat of the National Assembly being vacated), the outcome of the election will also be scrutinised from all angles: voter participation, margins of win and loss, polling incidents and what not. For days, in fact weeks and months, this electoral activity will be used as a reference point to prove or disprove forecasts about the general elections in 2018.

But, of course, all of this will not change the key fact that Pakistan’s attritional politics is pushing the country deeper and deeper into a quagmire from which no electoral activity is likely to pull it out. In fact, every time a polling exercise is conducted attritional politics increases friction, bad blood and divisions. More poison begins to run into the national blood stream than before, enhancing existing levels of toxicity. To be sure, the democratic right to vote is not responsible for this vicious cycle. The dynamics of a situation that has been created over the past few years, and which now looks to be in no one’s control, are shaping these unfortunate trends.

This would have been different if the market of national politics had been allowed to produce its own results rather than being manipulated by inside traders wielding law and guns. A PTI thriving on the cumulative public anger at the general incompetence of the government in power in 2018 would have been an ideal correcting mechanism in the system. It would have reduced the PML-N’s monopoly over power in Punjab and would have altered the numbers game in the National Assembly through an election supervised by a reformed and empowered Election Commission.

But that opportunity has passed. Nawaz’s disqualification has taken the burden of electoral accountability off his shoulders. Just when he was getting close to being served his just deserts, he was forced to leave the table. Now he plays the victim at every forum, calls the shots from behind the scenes, runs the affairs of the state when he so wishes and yet is not answerable to anyone.

The next stage of his treatment – jail – will hardly put the kibosh on him. It may get Shaikh Rashid and Imran Khan a temporary reason to party, but in terms of real-life politics N League’s politics would find more energy through a jailed Nawaz. The gambit of throwing power punches at the Sharif family via the judiciary is fast running out of credible steam. It is a thin fig leaf that does not even impress many members of the judiciary itself. When legal contraptions become the main recourse for dispensing justice, not many fall for moral exhortations and heavy citations.

As all this has unfolded, the PTI’s bouts of grand hopes have alternated with short-lived jubilation. The party, however, has moved away from its real and original potential. If Lahore’s last two political gatherings are a guide, the party has suffered a great deal in terms of public resonance. Imran Khan may not realise it, but foul-mouthing opponents and critics is not political ideology. Tweeting self-acclaimed and dubious tales of glory and achievement is not a marketing strategy. Abuse is not aggression. Strutting on the stage is not leadership.

No matter which way you look at it, Nawaz Sharif is an over-milked cow for the PTI. Pressing it is not adding anything to the party’s political prospects. The N-League has to be completely dismantled in Punjab for the PTI to gain space – and this is not happening. Minus that, if national elections were to be held      tomorrow, the best the party can hope for is to repeat its 2013 electoral performance in Punjab with a few additional seats but some significant losses in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In fact, more complexity has been added to the PTI’s electoral affairs because of its self-inflicted wounds of war with the Election Commission. The point at which Imran Khan has taken his feud with the ECP is very close to insanity. This is a constitutional body that will supervise the next elections and holds legal sway over who will and won’t contest. Imran Khan’s endless and bruising attack on the ECP and his refusal to meet legal requirements in party funds scrutiny and contempt cases may have reasons. It is either based on the simple-minded theory that he can punch his way out of the situation or the assumption that somehow this body will be completely retooled by the time the next election is round the corner.

Of course, the legal pathway to the ECP getting refashioned as per Imran Khan’s requirement is not available. The only way it is possible is a big purge before the polls carried out with the help of the army and the judiciary. Why would these two institutions get involved in an exercise like this? And if they don’t, how does Imran hope to hop across the line of total victory with his present set of issues involving his party, public support and the ECP?

And if the PTI does not get its act together how do you get a more productive equilibrium in the political system, which at present is jammed by hatred and mutual attrition? The answer is obvious: you can’t. And therein lies real trouble for the country in desperate need for sane and focused decision and policy making at a time of great regional and global tumult.

We are on the radar screen of powerful countries and, regardless of what we say at home, our position is not one of strength but of weakness. The economy is in serious trouble and governance challenges are getting grimmer by the day. The country will not move an inch ahead if its politics remains debilitating, crippling and immersed in hostility and damning divisions.

The daily cycle of point-scoring and exhibition of viciousness adequately fills media hours and may even please frustrated hearts and partisan minds. It may even create a fake impression of some change for the better being round the corner, but in reality Pakistan is in the grip of serious internal crisis that no one has a workable solution for. Every day breaks with the same tiring routine of artillery firing on each other’s posts and ends with the promise of more of the same the next day. The project to fix Pakistan has ended up achieving the exact opposite. The desire for national unity has run against strange stratagems and airy-fairy schemes.

If the country were a lab, these experiments would have caused little damage other than burning a few hands. But it is not a lab nor are its people guinea-pigs. Messing around with its systems, which are already weak and fragile, is not the way to run it. It is not the way to fix it. It is a sure-shot way to ruin it further.

Serious reform based on political consensus is the only way forward. Raza Rabbani, the Senate chairman, has said it more than once that institutions transgressing their mandated roles will spell doom. He is not far wrong. It is a pity that wise words and commonsensical analysis of what needs to be done to get out of the present quagmire has such poor reception these days. Sanity seems to have taken a long leave.

The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12