Daily Times

Two and a half months into the launch of the azaadi (independence) march, the battle that started between Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif has turned into a battle between the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). At first sight, this would look like an outright victory for Mr Sharif. A deeper analysis, however, reveals that this battle announces the beginning of a new political order in Pakistan that is centred around two crowd pullers, 62-year-old Imran Khan and the 26-year-old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

Despite its electoral successes in the 1990s and in 2013, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has never been credited with having the mass support the PPP enjoyed under the leadership of Zulfikar Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. It is always considered a party that relies on winnable candidates and its understanding of ‘the system’. It is also worth noticing that every election since 1990 that the PML-N has won has been marred with allegations of system-wide rigging. In the case of 1990, the allegations were endorsed by a forum none other than the Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan. In short, the PML-N has represented the power politics that were the hallmark of 1950s and 1960s Pakistan.

The rise of the PTI does provide Pakistan with the opportunity where it can have more than one (in this case two) nationwide choices, both primarily relying on mass support of their leadership and manifestos to usher in the politics of fair play and ideology. Doing this requires a broader understanding between the two on the rules of the game and on ensuring that the rules of the game are set in a way that they do not allow for manoeuvring of the political process by people holding key positions within state institutions: opinion-makers and power-players. With the PTI having strong support among urban and educated voters and the PPP focusing on its historic support among farmers and the working class, both sides will have enough support and enough of the floating vote to lay claim to power in a level playing field. If both parties succeed in ensuring that, there will be little room left for the power politics that relies on the system.

The PPP’s ideology, its politics and the personalities of its leadership did create a sizeable segment in Pakistan that dislikes it, just as it created a segment that adores it. This segment in the past would always look for an alternative in its dislike for the PPP without giving much regard to the merits or fairness of the alternative. This segment gave the PML-N its only ideological/core force as a political party in the 1980s and 1990s. This segment will continue to dislike the PPP but in the case of Mr Khan and his PTI, this segment now has a choice that has a broader mass support across Pakistan and can lay claim to power without reliance on any “Asghar Khan case”.

It is in the interest of both the PPP and the PTI to work for a system that ensures that transfer of power happens through a free, fair and transparent vote. The more we move towards it, the more central these two parties will become to Pakistan’s political landscape. But, for now, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. There exists a very high element of distrust between the two parties.

In the case of the PPP, the PTI thinks it, over the years, has become a political party that relies on the same tactics as the PML-N and thus will be bent on checking the party with same measures and manoeuvres as the PML-N resorts to. For the PPP, living through Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s, where the personal dislikes of powerful people in the army, judiciary and bureaucracy let their personal biases reflect in their call of duty to load the dice against the PPP, it is hard to accept an Imran Khan, who now enjoys massive support among those quarters. They fear the same unfairness and onslaught as they faced in the 1980s and 1990s when the political affiliations of the men on top impacted their administrative judgments. This is a fear the PPP has lived through and it will need strong guarantees in the presence of this fear for any collaboration. No wonder, as was pointed out by one of the most astute observers of Pakistani politics, Husain Haqqani, in Bilawal’s Karachi speech he was trying to define the history of the PPP and Pakistani politics not in the context of dynasty but in the context of struggle against the establishment.

The PPP and PTI will need to come forward and address each other’s apprehensions. They will need to define the rules of the game for fair play, ensuring free and fair elections and ensuring mechanisms to respect the other’s mandate. They will have to define mechanisms that leave little room for political affiliations of men in powerful positions to make issues like accountability, the justice system and administrative justice become tools for a political witch-hunt. Pakistan needs a charter of democracy between the PTI and PPP, the two ideological mass support parties, to get rid of the 1950s and 1960s style of politicking that not only steals the fair mandate of the masses but is also the root cause of politicisation of state institutions and crippling of the state machinery in Pakistan.

Imran Khan, 62, and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, 26, are bound to have a political clash. But in the mass support they have, they have a common interest to establish a system that ensures fair play, non-interference of the administration in the political process, a strong libel law framework and an apolitical accountability process and judicial system. For Imran, this is the most sellable sales pitch to his constituency. For Bilawal, this is the crux of his party’s long struggle. With the mass support he has generated, Imran does not need the clutches of the establishment to lay his claim to power. And the PPP’s stints in power have been against the whims of the established order. They both will be winners in this new understanding. The sooner they move to this the better, for 1950s and 1960s power politicking will keep plaguing Pakistan if they do not.

The author can be reached on twitter at @aalimalik