Who will fill the political vacuum?

Ever since elections brought the PML-N into power in Pakistan, there has been a profound political vacuum at the heart of the region. There is a brutal truth in Pakistan: if there is a political vacuum, a saga of violence will fill it. There is no point in talking of a faltering in the electoral process. There is a judicial process in motion. Into this vacuum have moved those who believe that only an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth concept has any credibility and that the tougher you are with your opposition the better you look back at voters. This need not be.
The question of who will fill the power vacuum has never before been felt as acutely as it is today or in as many different arenas of politics and economics simultaneously. At the NA 246 elections in Karachi, there was a palpable sense of nostalgia for a time when concerted, timely, effective national leadership — in any sphere, by any one political party — was imaginable. There was also little doubt after the results that the voters would not be returning to their PTI leadership any time soon or that many voters would even welcome the slogan naya (new) Pakistan in the coming elections, at least in the NA 246 constituency.
Today there is an Imran-shaped vacuum in Pakistani politics. Both the PPP and MQM agree that the political space still exists, even if they dispute where it is. Both camps claim that they represent the mainstream majority but the PPP’s dismal poll ratings tell us otherwise. The PML-N won the cantonment board elections with the PTI at second and MQM securing third. It could be that a PTI winning majority is simply unthinkable for the foreseeable future. The electorate has become too fragmented, alienated and cynical. Times are too tough. There may be something in that.
After a week of electoral politics in Karachi, driven by the PTI and JI bid for victory at NA 246, it is evident that the political vacuum is not limited to economics and electoral rigging alone. Rather, the country is facing a vacuum of leadership in each of the political, diplomatic and strategic arenas, and what is filling this vacuum is a mixture of the good, the bad and the highly unpredictable. Years from now, this may yet be seen as a period of national creative destruction, a transition away from a false and iniquitous stability towards a more sustainable, diversely founded equilibrium of national interests. In the meantime, the process of filling the vacuum is likely to be volatile, demanding and deeply disorienting.
First, how is the vacuum in national political leadership? The absence of concerted action has most acutely been displayed in the PPP’s response to the current national and local political situations. Once the most popular party ever, today one can regularly read that the PPP is the most lost in Pakistan. While probably true since a sample of opinion can be seen from postings on the internet, one suspects the wider, more political public take a more complicated and narrow attitude towards it. A widening chasm of credibility between voters and politicians, and between the leadership and the economics of intra-party fragmentation has its roots in part in the evidence of poor credibility. The problem, however, is that absent credible confidence building measures of sufficient size fail to reassure people and, as a result, the vacuum is being filled by politicians aggressively campaigning for justice flanked by an army of opportunists for an ever-darker horizon.
When the apparently respectable heads of the mainstream political parties create the gap left by their misdeeds, praising Imran Khan as someone who brought a degree of credibility to national politics, reveals the little choices left open to the poor public. Insofar as politics is a process of employing systematic force to take from the many in order to enrich the few, it is necessarily corrupt even when it is all legally legitimate. To members of the class dedicated to what they might call reasonable discourse, political power is always at least necessary and is never itself questioned.
The crisis of credibility afflicting established national institutions and political powers has been exacerbated by what Imran Khan has called a new transparency driven by the creation of the Judicial Commission inquiry that would make electoral rigging and political hypocrisy far harder to sustain. A bonfire of orthodoxies is under way, in every arena from the general elections to what stability in the Arab world means, to the price of prosperity in Pakistan and to the sustainability of Saudi imperial commitments, at home and abroad.
Despite strategic military interventions, the urgency for a solution is growing. Nawaz Sharif is wrong to argue that it is business as usual in Pakistan despite the political impasse. Security is getting worse and more people are dying, while investor confidence is weakening, as companies fear a return to the brutal terrorism wave. The country cannot afford this political vacuum. A fair political process seems necessary today only because it avoids a war within society, one in which various political factions and interest groups vie for a larger share of the plunder. If Imran Khan demonstrates anything at all it is not that moral ambiguity is an unavoidable part of making society at large function stably but rather that the state is inherently and fundamentally a kind of institution that relies on relationships all of us would regard as criminal misconduct in our own lives.
There is no such thing as a power vacuum that must be filled by political power. Social power, the kind made up of peaceful interactions and exchanges, is more than sufficient to create social order. It is fashionable in media these days to assert that Pakistan has arrived on the world stage economically and politically. Certainly, Pakistan’s political and business elites have acquired great wealth — explained and unexplained — yet the vast majority of Pakistanis face a daily struggle to survive under a government that is often either absent or corrupt, where there are high levels of common and organised crime, a chronic lack of formal employment opportunities and the highest levels of insecurity. Though it is now caught in a painful political transition, Pakistan has the potential to become a world-class economic and political powerhouse. But it is not there yet. Several necessary ingredients are missing.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum but a vacuum threatening to become a strategic void at a critical juncture in national economic and political affairs is not likely to last, or be filled in an orderly, peaceful manner. A national race is on for concerted action and everyone will lose if the vacuum is left to fill itself.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com