The alternative moment

The brazen violation of the constitution that took place on April 3 was, in a simple sense, a demonstration of egotistical populism led by a man who has been consistently showing a propensity toward modern-day proto-fascism for the last few years.

He may not be the only populist to reveal linkages between populism and proto-fascism, but Imran Khan has most successfully demonstrated what happens to politics in a country when politics becomes hostage to the whims of a strongman, when revenge trumps everything else. This is where populism, fascist tendencies and crisis fuse together to provide a situation where even the veneers of democracy are shattered ruthlessly: Viktor Orban did it on March 20, 2020 (the ‘coronavirus coup’); Kais Saied did it on July 25, 2021 (the ‘legislative coup’); Imran Khan did it on April 03, 2022 (the ‘constitutional coup’) – in different yet very similar fashions.

On the other side of the spectrum, the opposition has been doing exactly what pro-people politics does not look like: mobilising the constitutional provisions to materialize a pre-electoral advantage at the expense of economic stability and smooth democratic transition. While there are no facts contradicting the fact that the PTI government has caused unprecedented deterioration of living conditions for vast swathes of the working and middle classes, the no-confidence motion, despite representing the sentiments of a large number of Pakistanis, was not a result of a mass movement seeking the ouster of the premiere before the completion of the term.

Yes, the breadth and depth of the crisis has caused havoc hitherto unexperienced, but the opposition’s move was simply a result of the genius of nefarious power-calculus involving a similar kind of ‘political-buying’ that facilitated Imran Khan’s ascent in 2018. Moreover, we should not forgive the mainstream parties for producing the conditions that provided fodder for the emergence of Imran Khan’s reactionary populism.

Clearly, those conditions were not provided by the mainstream parties alone, but instead, as some of us would rightly argue, by the historically-main, perpetually-consistent contradiction in Pakistani politics: the establishment. One wonders how it situates itself in the here and now.

While one can argue that the last nail in the coffin of the PTI had been put before Khan scandalised the ‘US intervention’, what’s clear is that the powers that be would remember it as a ‘violation’ of the rules of the game. It’s not important if Imran Khan’s ouster was less or more humiliating than Nawaz Sharif’s, what’s significant is the Hegelian dialectic applied to the ongoing situation in Pakistan: the conceivably-constructive approach of Sharif to forge ties with neighbouring India is as problematic to our power-brokers as the conceivably-destructive approach of Khan of implicating the US in a fake scandal.

Historians would know better and there most certainly have been instances in Pakistan’s history marking the convergence of varying crises. But hardly have there been occurrences in recent history where the multiplicity of socio-economic, environmental and political contradictions was more pronounced than today: the emperor is more clothes-less than ever; the puppet’s populism met its demise sooner than predicted; the wanna-be-puppets and the misnomers for democracy have no programme to offer. And all of this is taking place in the midst of unprecedented inflation, rising unemployment, excruciating living conditions, looming environmental catastrophe and a general, prevailing sense of socio-political alienation. This is the alternative moment, a Gramscian interregnum where morbid symptoms would increase in number and intensity, but also a Heideggerian inception – the breaking with the ongoing cycle and realm within which we’ve been placed forcefully.

This forced placement of ours within this political realm needs greater emphasis: just like the essence of technology, to Heidegger, does not lie in machines or their components but in the limits of the modes of thinking to which technology confines us (inducing a ‘forgetfulness’ of what we were, what we are and what we can be); the essence of Pakistani politics is not institutional intervention into politics but the forced placement of masses within a realm that portrays itself as immanent, on the one hand, and actively incorporates forgetfulness and ‘inertia to recalling’, on the other.

The technology of the civil-military power elite (and the constellation of political, corporate, judicial and mass-media forces that revolve around it) has been undertaking a two-pronged project for decades: producing repressive parties and repressing progressive forces. This is how you construct a realm that, on the one hand, offers very limited and marginally dissimilar options, and, on the other, continuously represses the emergence of strikingly dissimilar (progressive) forces. The people of Pakistan have been forcefully placed within this realm where the military-industrio-financial complex sits next to ‘democracy’, where politico-welfarist Islam plays with global capital.

There arrive moments in history, the Heideggerian ‘events’ – not naturally or by virtue of stages – where the defences of the realm start exhausting, producing a dominant sense of abandonment and orphanage for many: a sudden opportunity to overcome forgetfulness. This, I argue, is one of the unique moments that offers itself to the Left to take notice of the inflating contradictions and socio-political anxieties positing themselves as specific sites conjoined to the 'main' contradiction.

Out there are people deprived of the basic conditions that make life liveable, but also groups of those young people who were shown dreams of a better life first and then were made to experience the dreams displaced into vengeance that they now overwhelmingly share with their leader. This is the situation with the PTI voters, whose collective unconscious, unfortunately, underwent a dangerous displacement of dreams into revenge, of hope into worthless devotion.

Out there are also groups of people who are tired of being mobilised into ‘causes’ whose realisation is neither worth-pursuing nor possible (without striking a deal). The technology and its organs will continue to surveil the realm and tighten its borders, especially in times of looming exhaustion. But each rupture in its aggregate mass is worth the struggle.

The writer is the editor of Folio Books (a Lahore-based independent publishing house) and a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party. He tweets @BilalZahuur