party
Understanding PTI’s populism
The PTI has, increasingly successfully, created a popular equivalential chain between a heterogeneity of social groups and demands coalesced together through the use of its signifiers of ‘Change’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Dignity’ ensconced under the rubric of an assertive, cultural-
nationalist re-articulation of Pakistani nationhood
By Ammar Rashid

In the “The Rebirth of History” (2012), the French philosopher Alain Badiou attempts to contextualise the unrest and uprisings occurring across the world today by referring to them as characteristics of what he calls an ‘intervallic’ period of history. For Badiou, an intervallic period is one of contradiction, crisis and revolt albeit with a critical distinction — it is a phase where the revolutionary alternatives of the previous period (in this case, socialism) lie dormant as a result of internal contradictions and external attacks and have not yet been taken up by a new sequence in their development.

Thus, while the intervallic period is rife with discontent and rebellion, it lacks a shared and universally practicable Idea of emancipation, resulting in a politics of rebellion that is essentially negative (Down with Mubarak) rather than ideologically positivist and a politics of reaction that renews its emphasis on the ‘natural order of things’ (The End of History).

For Badiou, the early-to-mid-19th century was another such phase, in which the revolutionary republicanism of the 18th century lay ‘discredited’ and church-sanctioned liberal monarchy sought to reassert itself as the ‘natural’ and dominant organising principle of the age.

In Pakistan, no phenomenon straddles the intervallic contradictions of the age between the status quo and revolt as finely as the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf. Held up by its fervent supporters as the harbinger of revolution, Imran Khan’s PTI has been variably derided by its critics as vacuous, anti-politics, reactionary, elitist, an establishment tool and, of course, populist.

Pakistan’s most prominent political purveyor of ‘change’ has been possibly the most discussed political party in the country over the last two years. However, as is the case with much of political debate in Pakistan, most of the discussion has taken the form of polarised and partisan argumentation between the party’s supporters and detractors, replete with considerable moralisation from both sides. Less effort has been expended (with some exceptions) on a socio-historical contextualisation of the PTI or on efforts to understand why the phenomenon takes the discursive and practical shape it does. That the party and its leadership are urban-centric, middle-class-focused and populist appears to be the general consensus; less of a consensus exists on the questions of why this form of populism is emerging in Pakistan in the manner that it is today and what it tells us about the shifting contours of Pakistani society.

The answers, as one might expect, are complex and multi-dimensional and they require both an interrogation of the idea of populism as well as an exploration of the socio-historical context in which the PTI has emerged as a potent political force.

Though the incidence of populism is nearly as old as recorded history (Caesarian populism being a prominent historical example), modern understandings of the term generally conceive of it as a phenomenon associated with the nation state and tied to the cyclical contradictions of capitalist growth. The contemporary theoretical consensus on populism (embodied in the works of theorists like Laclau, Jansen, Meny and Surel, among others) understands it as a distinct type of political logic that seeks to protect the interests of ‘the people’ which it sees as being in antagonistic opposition to an ‘institutional elite’.

This is done through the use of what Laclau calls ‘empty signifiers’, ideas like ‘Freedom’ and ‘Justice’, which act as the template for creating an equivalence between the varied demands that populism seeks to represent. Importantly, populism is also characterised by emotive and affective investment in popular symbols in the course of mobilisation, which distinguishes it from the more ‘rational’ and institutionalised political modalities of the existing mainstream.

The reason populism is understood as a universal category is precisely because its disparate variants tend to be so remarkably congruous in their manifestations across societies and historical periods. An examination of the incidence of populist movements around the world reveals that the phenomenon is tied to a number of distinct social, economic and political conditions that underpin its emergence.

The emergence of populism connotes firstly a crisis of representation. It appears when the legitimacy of formal political institutions in society is under question and when the political economy arrangements underpinning those institutions have left a critical multitude of social demands unfulfilled. There is little need to elaborate upon why this is true in the case of Pakistan. Pakistan’s representative institutions have historically suffered from tenuous legitimacy after years of interrupted democratisation, direct military rule and a parallel, informal system of political distribution. The current phase of nominal democratic rule, commencing in the midst of serious global and domestic economic crises and full-blown insurgencies, has done little to bolster the credibility of political institutions that have (justifiably so in most cases) shouldered much of the blame for the economic and security woes of multiple social groups in the country, particularly the now sizable, yet squeezed and insecure urban middle class.

While the popular de-legitimisation of civilian political institutions has occurred earlier as well, this may be the first historical period since 1971 that the military has also, for a number of reasons, been the regular target of public ire. This, as well as the emergence of an inter-dependent centre of power in the Supreme Court, has contributed to the weakening of the military’s earlier legitimacy  as a governing alternative, clearing the space for the PTI’s populism to emerge as a professed alternative to the politics of patronage.

Populism is also understood by theorists as being associated with a breakdown in the symbolic framework of hegemony governing society. This is evident in Pakistan, where the state has seen an erosion of both its monopoly over violence and its control over the national narrative in recent years. The military-dominated state’s hegemonic framework of Islam, National Security and Jihad now exists as a space of severe contestation, from actors as varied as Deobandi militants, the electronic media, the US, ethno-nationalists, progressives, Barelvi Sunnis and Shias, among others.

In the frontiers of postcolonial states, the weakening of the hegemonic framework connotes separatism and insurgency — closer to the centre, it tends to precipitate populism. Crucially, populism tends to recognise and bemoan the breakdown of the hegemonic order, while expressing a desire to reconfigure it within the comfort of continuity (rather than complete insurrectionary rupture).

The PTI’s discourse as well can be seen as an attempt to ‘re-imagine’ Pakistani nationhood through radical investment in the signifiers (‘Insaf’, ‘Dignity’) created in the course of the popular phenomenon but ultimately within the original parameters established by official statehood, which encompass a continued affinity for national security and the primacy of Islam (albeit a ‘Modernist’ interpretation of it rhetorically differentiated from the militant Islam of the prevailing hegemonic framework). Appeals by Imran Khan to the lost ideals of ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ are reminiscent of what Taggart would refer to as populism’s commitment to an imagined metaphysical sense of a ‘heartland’, usually located in an idealised blend of national tradition and progress.

A constitutive societal ingredient critical to the emergence of populist movements is a heterogeneous social terrain. Populism tends to thrive in societies tending towards increasing social and economic heterogeneity, or increased differentiation of identification amongst social groups. Pakistan, which has witnessed considerable socio-economic fragmentation in recent years due to rapid urbanisation, an absence of sustained industrial growth, and an increasingly services-based economy with large levels of informality and disguised unemployment, can be said to contain a distinctly heterogeneous urban social landscape where the traditional unifying homologies of class, caste, clan or ethnicity are increasingly unable to adequately represent the totality of the differentiated social demands that remain unfulfilled in an economic slump within a skewed, informal system of political patronage.

In the case of Pakistan, this inadequately representative milieu is exacerbated by years of the suppression of popular and left-wing parties and groups by the state and the cooptation of multiple subordinate social groups within the politics of state patronage. Hence, amidst increased, differentiated disaffection and the concurrent weakness of traditional bases for political organisation, the need arises for the creation of a popular symbol that creates a unifying link between these heterogeneous demands in order for them to be represented politically. The PTI may be said to serve the role of these popular symbols for much of the excess population of the unrepresented in the country’s political heartland.

This heterogeneity of the PTI’s support base reveals itself in the results of its recent intra-party elections as well — the victors range from landlords and industrialists to small farmers, mechanics, carpenters and teachers.

This characteristic heterogeneity of populism’s support base also has an impact on populism’s ideological character, which, with few exceptions, tends towards emptiness. Populist movements the world over commonly point towards the ‘corruption’ of parasitic groups in positions of authority, rather than situate the cause of the prevailing crisis as a structural problem of the socio-economic system itself. The PTI is no exception — it describes Pakistan’s primary social antagonism as the consequence of a moral shortcoming of the political elite (and its collusion in what it sees as an immoral war) and posits policy prescriptions more ‘technocratic’ and ‘reformist’ than radical.

While some understand this as reflecting the conservative milieu and capitalistic affinities of the middle class core of populism, it is also a reflection of the heterogeneity of the cross-sectional demands that populism coalesces. Given the vast and differentiated multitude of interests and demands suffering from inadequate representation (ranging, in Pakistan, from disgruntled large business owners to informal wage labor), the popular project is compelled to divest itself of ideological coherence and particularism and embrace the emptiness of nebulous signifiers like ‘Change’ and ‘Justice’.

In this way, one can understand the ‘vagueness’ and ‘imprecision’ of populisms like the PTI as a function of the very differentiated social reality they emerge from. (A comparison with Bhutto’s somewhat more ideologically-focused populism in an era of relatively greater social homogeneity and a left-leaning global ethos would be instructive here but would also require a separate essay.)

Finally, the emergence of populism represents a breakdown in the institutional logic of society, or the differential framework of incentives and relationships that binds together various groups and interests within a social system. In the words of Laclau, “the less a society is kept together by immanent differential mechanisms, the more it relies on the supposed transcendence offered by populist phenomena”. The role of the leader at such an impasse becomes crucial — as the differential framework deteriorates, the popular leader often comes to represent the very ground of the popular singularity or the equivalential chain linking the series of disaffected groups/demands together.

The mechanisms of this process are best explicated by Freudian crowd theory. For Freud, if the distance between the ego and the ‘ego-ideal’ (or the inner image of oneself as one wants to become) of the populous increases (as would be the case amidst rising disaffection and deprivation), the populist leader begins to serve the very role of ego-ideal for the populous. Khan, for his ardent supporters, serves as an example of a role model worthy of emulation and a human antidote to what they see as the evils corrupting society and limiting themselves.

Needless to say, there is much that can be gleaned from the support for Khan about the aspirations of upwardly mobile classes in urban Pakistan (or at least Punjab and KPK), for whom questions of identity, religion and modernity are hugely significant in a post-911 world, with Imran Khan perhaps providing hope of conceptual and sociopolitical synthesis between those spheres.

In sum, the PTI has, increasingly successfully, created a popular equivalential chain between a heterogeneity of social groups and demands coalesced together through the use of its signifiers of ‘Change’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Dignity’ ensconced under the rubric of an assertive, cultural-nationalist re-articulation of Pakistani nationhood. This acknowledgement of success has to be tempered, however, by recognition of the PTI’s geographical limitations — the party remains predominantly located in urban spaces in Punjab and KPK, still failing to find a base for its populism within the ethno-nationalist-dominated peripheries of the Pakistani state, where many remain suspicious of centralising nationalist narratives.

While alarmism about the PTI’s potential for fascism seems largely unwarranted (the party has consistently, more than most others, rhetorically affirmed its commitment to the protection and welfare of marginalised and minority groups), wariness about the transformative potential of its populism is less so, as history and theory are wont to remind us. The emphasis on moral corruption makes a substantive transformation of exploitative structures unlikely beyond the punitive sentencing of some of the ‘corrupt’. The indifference to structural critique makes possible alliances with the very groups and institutions that preserve the exploitative political economy of mass exclusion.

Furthermore, the heterogeneity of populism’s support base brings with it inherent tensions of conflicting interests that impinge on its reformative success — many, though not all, populist phenomena dissipate in the midst of internecine conflict within the populist coalition. And crucially, populism’s innate hostility to formal representation often results in the loss of popular legitimacy when it becomes associated with formal institutions of power, something that the PTI will undoubtedly have to cope with in the instance of electoral success. There is also the perennial threat of personalisation of authority associated with populism, which, to its credit, the PTI may have diluted through the creditable institution of substantive intra-party democracy.

All such concerns, however, should not be taken as reasons to dismiss the phenomenological significance of the PTI. In an increasingly heterogeneous, post-industrial world in the midst of institutional and economic crises, where social identities are being rapidly contested and reconstituted amidst the backdrop of relentless capitalist accumulation and the disaffection of multiple social classes and groups, such populisms represent large arenas of socio-political reconfiguration whose dimensions are likely to expand and thus, deserve serious attention and engagement. That the social conditions in Pakistan are uniquely amenable for such phenomena is evident in the organisational success of not just the PTI, but even impermanent populist mobilisations like Tahir-ul-Qadri’s ‘movement’ for electoral reform.

Finally one shouldn’t forget that, for all the cynical Machiavellian manipulation it can disguise, populism represents a collective yearning for a more visceral and ‘real’ form of politics, one that is non-cynical and transparently representative. As Laclau might say, it is something central to the very ontological constitution of the political itself, a political event that can generate its own rules and modalities. The response to it has to involve a collective self-reflection about the fault-lines and contradictions that generate the popular phenomena, for understanding and engaging with them is necessary for anyone interested in the possibilities of genuine people-centric transformation in Pakistan and beyond.

The writer is an independent researcher based in Islamabad. He can be contacted on ammar.rashid@gmail.com

Too big to handle
Only a strong government with political legitimacy can complete the task of new provinces
By Arshi Saleem Hashmi

Bahawalpur Janoobi Punjab, the name of the new proposed province is not just a name. The idea of hitting many birds with one stone can be counterproductive leading to severe consequences. Whoever came up with this “brilliant” idea of mixing the demand of restoration of Bahawalpur as a separate province and attaching it with the rest of the Seraiki belt has committed a fatal mistake.

For many years now, Pakistan’s various governance related problems conclude one thing; the country is too big to be administratively handled through four provinces. The issue has been surfacing and resurfacing depending on the political situation. Last year the demand for new provinces gained momentum, thanks to the media at both political and public level and the bill presented by the MQM.

The issue of the creation of Bahawalpur province or “Seraiki province” had been discussed both in the National Assembly and in Senate. While the demand for more provinces appears to be quite logical given the administrative problems that the provincial governments face, the mechanism needs to be very maturely pursued. The lacuna in understanding and political decision making is making it more complicated. An analysis of the issue would not be complete without looking into the constitutional status, media coverage and people’s perspective.

Constitutional status:

The constitution of Pakistan has defined a mechanism for creating new provinces in the Article 239. The article explains that creating a new province would require a two-third majority in the two houses of the parliament and then again a two-third majority in the provincial assembly of the province to be divided.

As the Clause 4 of the Article 239 states that “A bill to amend the constitution which would have the effect of altering the limits of a province shall not be presented to the president for assent unless it has been passed by the provincial assembly of that province by the votes of not less than two-thirds of its total membership.”

First the bill about the creation of new province should be originated by either of the houses of the parliament and it has to be approved by the two third majorities of the both houses. Afterwards, it has to be approved by the provincial assembly of the province that is to be divided by minimum two third majorities.

Debates in National Assembly and Senate:

There were intermittent debates in the National Assembly regarding the new province issues. As we know that besides Bahawalpur province, there is also a debate going around on the issue of Hazara province. The issue of new provinces was raised very often in both the National Assembly and in Senate, as most of the debates held in 2012 in both the houses of the parliament. Bahawalpur as a separate issue is not discussed very frequently in National Assembly. There were not much debates on the issue of new provinces, rather it has been more highlighted in the media.

Debates in media:

If we objectively analyse this issue especially the creation of ‘Janoobi province’ or ‘Bahawalpur province’, it appears that it has not been much highlighted and discussed in the Parliament as it is discussed on the media. A chronological analysis of the issue shows that much of the debates or discussions were originated back in 2012 and very few in last five years. Parliamentarians did not discuss it on the floor of the parliament as they had been doing it in front of media; this creates serious doubt about the sincerity of the government as well as opposition. More than addressing the grievances of people, winning the argument on media appears to be more important. An administrative problem that is crucial to ensure good governance is not seriously taken by our legislative branch.

The news reports and opinion pieces from leading newspapers in Pakistan show that media, particularly print media, has been very consistent in reporting any development in this regard while political parties, keeping in view long term political consequences for their parties, have been fighting the verbal battles on various TV channels.

People’s perspective:

According to public opinion, the Bahawalpur province should not be created on the linguistic basis, as this is not the reason to do so. If the southern Punjab province is created on the ethnic and linguistics basis, then it will encourage other ethnic groups to demand their own provinces, which will disturb the unity and harmony in the country. The government can think of making a province in the southern region on the basis of administrative necessity.

Majority of the people believe that the province issue is just a political stunt to gain votes in elections. Keeping in mind that this issue was highlighted more this year, many people said that the government was inactive regarding this issue and now as the elections are fast approaching they are using different tools to get the votes, and the ‘new province issue’ is one of the tool.

Restructuring of the political landscape of Pakistan without any thinking on the repercussions would be disastrous. Decisions like these which need consensus among the stakeholders and the political representatives cannot be materialised for this would lead to further mayhem. A strong government with political legitimacy and complete control over the governance can initiate and complete the task.