Politics, tsunamis and anti-politics

One of the most fascinating aspects of the discussion that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is helping to bring to the fore is about the kind of politics that dominates Pakistan. This is not really about the PTI at all. It is about a much more fundamental disconnect between what has been referred to, both pejoratively and lovingly, as the divide between “new politics” and “old politics,” between “clean,” and “dirty” politics, between the “political” and the “anti-politics.”
The energy that the PTI is tapping into is supposed to be the new politics. Indeed it is new. It represents the ascent to the relevance of a relatively new political party. It represents the political activation of middle and upper-middle class Pakistani city folk. It is fresh insofar as it introduces a face to mainstream politics that has languished on the political periphery.
The morass of failure and the burden of history, on the other hand, are carried by the supposedly old politics. The PPP, the PML-N and the PML-Q, the ANP and the MQM and the range of smaller religious and nationalist parties, all represent the old. They are old because they have already been in power in one way or another. They are old because the faces and names in those parties have been part of the landscape of mainstream politics for at least one generation, some much longer.
The new and old distinction, however, is not just about political parties. It is about the mood that politicians are trying to set. By the time the next election takes place, each of the mainstream parties will market themselves as representative of the “new.”
The PPP will be debuting Bilawal Bhutto Zardari as the new face of reconciliation, liberalism and pro-poor politics. The Sharif family will be debuting Hamza Shahbaz Sharif and the rest of the party as the new face of governance, using the model of hands-on administrative efficiency that Shahbaz Sharif aspires to in Lahore. The MQM will be offering

the next election as a chance to reset the score in Karachi. A new range of younger MQM leaders will be promoted, both as part of an electoral strategy, and to purge the face of the party of some of the elder statesmen – many of whom have been sullied by the face-off against Zulfiqar Mirza and the PML-N (respectively). The ANP will stake its claim to newness by informing voters of the quiet confidence with which it has tried to manage the most difficult period in the history of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. And, oh, there’s the issue of the next election being the first for the province with its “new” name. Gifted to it by the “new” ANP. Most of all, the parties that have never had power, like the PTI, will offer themselves as new – because, of course, they’ve never held power before.
While they all clamour to be “new,” the political parties will also struggle to demonstrate that they represent “clean” politics. Each of them will make a case for how they represent the antithesis of the broken and corrupt politics that plagues all political systems, not just Pakistan’s. They will meet varying levels of success in this quest.
The most captivating disconnect, therefore, will not be between new and old politics, or between clean and dirty politics. The most captivating disconnect will be between the “political” and the “anti-politics.” Quite rightly, many commentators (most lucidly, Badar Alam for Dawn) have observed that there is a clear sentiment within the young supporters of the PTI that sneers at traditional party politics, not just because they practice patronage politics, or because they may be rife with corrupt politicians. Instead, there is a generic contempt among a substantial number of young, urban Pakistanis for the political system as a whole.
This is an important critique. The contempt for the political system as a whole is indeed a major challenge to solving the civil-military divide in Pakistan. It is this contempt that drives people, sick of dysfunctional governments, into the arms of eager corps commanders, rallying behind their chief of the army staff when the military has taken over power. This illegal and politically cancerous event has happened enough times in Pakistan for all Pakistanis to be legitimately concerned about it happening again – explicitly, or by stealth.
In the pulsating energy of the youthful and vibrant crowds that inform the PTI’s newfound prominence it is not clear if there is any line at all between the two distinct phenomena. A healthy disregard for failed governance models, systemic patronage and institutionalised corruption is one thing. A dangerous contempt for the political traditions of Pakistan, including the imprisonment, torture and murder of political leaders, and the systemic demonisation of rural politics is another. This distinction is not just a conceptual or philosophical issue. It is much deeper and has many serious implications for the next elections, for the PTI and for other parties.
As news of former PML-Q and PPP heavyweights joining the PTI spreads, many would ask whether Imran Khan should be courting people that are symbols of “old” politics, no matter how squeaky clean they may be. On Twitter, Marvi Memon openly questioned the wisdom of filling leadership gaps in a party of the “new” with faces of “old.” On the other hand, many are asking what the purpose of excluding people from the PTI would be. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, any politics, new or old, needs people who can win elections. If they have clean records, does it make sense to stack the party with unknowns who cannot win?
This dilemma is one that will be faced by any new entrant to the political system. There is probably a healthy split of opinion on this, not just among PTI supporters but among reformers within the traditional parties, from the PPP to the MQM and from the JUI-F to the PML-N.
Any new political movement must locate itself within the broader civil-military divide in Pakistan, and have a clear take on how to address it. To do this, it must actively seek to reject the “anti-politics” of some within the educated, urban space in Pakistan. Concurrently, however, new politics must be patient and breed leadership over several election cycles. Rejecting “anti-politics” does not necessitate having to accept or embrace the parts of the political system and culture that are broken, do not work, and need wholesale transformation.
No transformative agenda was ever achieved with a single “tsunami.” Pakistan is poised for change. Absorbing politicians from the mainstream into a party trying to establish a new culture is fine. Absorbing the culture that those politicians represent is not. Those that organically and patiently build a new political culture from the ground up will be the one that will achieve real change.

The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy.