Daily Times

August 2014, the month when both Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri decided to proceed with their protest and processions. It was hard to find a law professor in the country who did not take them seriously. The arguments about unfair justice and electoral rigging are, if not frivolous, close to the hearts of millions in Pakistan. The movement or the mental revolution appealed to the frustration of the masses and they formed the heart of the protests. After Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri called for an alternative mandate, supporters came to recognise the opportunity that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) had presented. Imran may not concede that it was the best chance he had of reaching a putative victory when he refused to agree to a proposed compromise. Today, no other leading politician supports their stance. The day after he presented his views to the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) he should have tried to create a direct understanding with other political parties but Nawaz Sharif played a masterstroke and gathered consensus from the other political parties, turning the PTI into an unconvincing loner.

PAT and PTI supporters did not get the results they had worked for. They went with their parties, even when this meant embracing a meaner option. This kind of thinking is unsurprising. In theory, we follow political leaders and join parties because they share our values and our goals. Values and goals may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities, and so we trust political leaders in that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues. However, these politicians and parties, though based on a set of principles, are not disinterested teachers in search of the truth. They are organised groups looking to increase their power. Or, as I would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy. There were people who brought it into their manifesto because it made sense and could work, and they were reluctant to let go of it. Then there were people who bought into it slowly for political advantage and were immediately willing to abandon it as soon as the political advantage went the other way. And then there is a third group that thought it made sense and then thought it through and changed their minds. Explaining his decision to end the sit-ins, Dr Qadri did not focus on the particulars of his new manifesto as closely as he should have had and has gone along with the brief that midterm elections are a strong probability.

This shift in the PAT leadership’s thinking is an insult to the people’s mandate, with the PTI declaring it not just inappropriate policy but contrary to the wishes of thousands of their supporters. This may not have shocked Imran but I would characterise Dr Tahirul Qadri’s relationship with the declared agenda of the PTI as truly bipolar. What is notable about the PAT response to the people’s mandate is not only the speed with which a political argument that was considered mainstream few months ago has suddenly become fringe but the political implications for the PTI that has spent two years arguing that electoral reforms are essential. Dr Qadri has started picking his way back through politics. He began building a proposal around the individual manifesto and tested it out on both the PTI and PML-N believing that he could achieve his political ambitions. Political parties do go through occasional, painful cleansings in which they emerge with political leaders who hold different opinions. But, in this case, the PTI’s supporters have simply become the PAT’s opponents.

Whatever the motives of individual politicians, the end result is the same: a policy that once enjoyed broad support within and outside the PAT suddenly faces unified opposition that is echoed, refined and popularised not only by the PTI but others affiliated with the party. This is what the sceptics call the “think tank industrial complex”, a group that tried to encourage the PAT and PTI to unite around policy solutions and a network of ideologically oriented targets. You can find a think tank to buttress any view or position in this noxious political climate and then you can bask in an aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to it. Partisans who may not have strong opinions on the underlying issues get a clear signal on what their party wants them to think along with reams of information on why they should think it.

All this suggests that the old model of compromise is going to have a very difficult time in today’s polarised political climate because it is typically not in the majority party’s interest to compromise with the minority party on big issues. Elections are a zero sum game where the majority party wins if the public thinks it has been doing a good job. The PTI’s motivated reasoning machine is likely to kick into gear on most major issues and since it is strategically valuable, the PTI could believe it is good for it to continue. This means the PTI cannot assume that policy based compromises that made sense at the beginning will survive to the end, because by that time whichever group has an interest in not compromising will likely have convinced itself that the compromise position is an awful idea, even if, just a few months ago, that group thought it was a great idea. This process just does not work anymore. The remarkable and simple trajectory of the PTI’s mandate debate, in other words, could simply be the best way forward.

I ask how, if politicians can so easily be argued out of their policy preferences, compromise is possible. I do not find it easy to answer this question because I am a psychiatrist and not a politician. If somebody says they sincerely changed their minds, then so be it. But if Imran is as always optimistic about the next bipartisan deal and again thinks he knows just where to start, then bipartisanship is going to be necessary to win something people can see and understand. Joining hands with the PAT was an example of a poor coalition.

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