Daily Times

Last week in Part 1 I had posed a few questions. Is JKT an innocent victim of palace intrigues or a powerful, manipulative political power broker using his political access to the PM and other power centres to gain an unfair financial advantage? Or both?

Will Jehangir Tareen commit political suicide by aligning with anti-Imran forces to bring his government down?

Is Imran shedding his old skin and finally coming into his own?

Is this the start of a genuine path to major reform of our entire system, especially our agricultural and business sectors, by removing its elite capture, or just another flash in the pan?

Jehangir Tareen is a businessperson first and a politician second, coming from an urban family with no political roots. However, he married into one and used them as a springboard to become a successful businessperson and agriculturist and vault into politics.

He’s ambitious, smart, savvy, brilliant at planning and execution and very ambitious. Hence, entering politics by joining Musharraf’s administration was a natural next step, first as advisor to then Chief Minister Pervez Ilahi and later Federal Minister of Industries and Production.

Many say he used his cabinet position to further his business interests, especially those in sugar, while simultaneously being considered by Musharraf to be one of his most effective ministers.

Political power is heady, and for an ambitious person like Jehangir Tareen, the perfect platform to achieve his business and political aspirations. After briefly flirting with PML (F), getting elected on their ticket in 2008, and thinking of floating his own political party of “clean politicians”, he resigned his National Assembly seat and joined PTI in 2011.

But the 2013 elections were a rude shock to everyone, especially party leader Imran, who thought he had done everything possible to win. From the partly self induced euphoria of thinking they would win the election, to capturing a mere 35 seats, the crash landing was hard, harsh and brutal.

Despite his resilience, Imran was broken hearted. It was then that Jehangir Tareen stepped in with an idea completely contrary to PTI’s election strategy thus far, advising Imran that if they did not resort to a “traditional” political strategy of constituency politics and awarded tickets to so called “political electables”, the party would never come in to power and implement their revolutionary reform agenda. The 2013 fiasco was clear evidence of the failure of the party’s idealistic strategy to give tickets to those who did not have “political” roots.

Party ideologues, like Hamid Khan and many others, were horrified. Everything they had worked towards was being upstaged by Jehangir Tareen, who they saw as a carpetbagger and an opportunist, diluting the party’s purist agenda of reform. But Imran bought into this strategy and appointed him Secretary General soon after in September 2013, and as many said then, virtually handed over party affairs to him. Imran and Tareen’s logic was simple.

“If we can’t win, we can’t reform”.

The party rank and file were appalled at this volte face, but Imran would have none of it, even allowing the party’s internal elections to be rigged to elect Jehangir Tareen and his supporters to party offices. The party was torn asunder into pro and anti-Tareen groups, resulting in many ideologues and die-hard members either violently opposing him or leaving the party or withdrawing into silent submission.

Tareen was vicious with those who opposed him or he considered a threat to this new strategy. He had them removed, hounded, banished and made ineffective from the inner sanctums of the party’s core decision making processes, including access to Imran.

Finally, his luck ran out when on 5 December 2017, he was found guilty of hiding his assets, a questionable verdict, especially when compared to Khawaja Asif’s case, a far clearer black and white evidence of guilt. Tareen’s darkest hour was April 2018, when the Supreme Court declared him ineligible to hold office for life.

Despite that, Imran stuck to him and he continued to exercise virtually the same power and influence he earlier had as party Secretary General.

By the time the 2018 elections came around, a very large number of PTI ticket holders, especially rural ones, came from traditional political feudal backgrounds, jumping ship to join what now seemed the winning horse, with many a direct result of Jehangir Tareen efforts to bring them into the party fold. When the party won the elections, Imran’s stand of sticking with the Tareen electables strategy seemed vindicated, further reinforced by Tareen’s wheeling and dealing in getting a PTI majority in Punjab. To Imran, he was a rainmaker.

In several conversations with Imran leading up to the elections and for a brief period after, it was clear that he still thought the world of Tareen, who continued to be his closest advisor and sounding board and was still given privileged access to government.

So what changed?

For one. 18 months later the PM was now firmly in the saddle, far less wobbly than in the early days, with an implementation infrastructure at his disposal to help plan and execute and, in his opinion, better understanding of governance, than Tareen.

Two. Imran, as is commonly known, has an amazing ability to learn new things and progressively, he found that he no longer needed Tareen’s day-to-day advice on governance.

In my opinion is elimination of regulation, no minimum support price and no export subsidies. Let market forces determine sugar cane buying and selling and the most efficient survive

Three, the PM now had “new friends and advisers” who were part of the administration and able to execute. Tareen, now outside the administration, couldn’t. And where he did try to influence decisions, he found stubborn resistance from many. This included the PM’s Principal Secretary, who now had the confidence of the PM, grossly misplaced in my opinion, and many now-powerful cabinet members who had felt victimized by Tareen in the past. Things had come full circle.

The sugar crisis, of which I will write in detail in Part 3, brought to the fore what was already inevitable.

Summarily, I think the sugar report is flawed, and has been investigated and written by people who have no idea about the industry. Secondly, sugar prices are determined not by market forces but by the minimum support price to growers, which constitutes 80% of the cost of sugar production, without a logical guaranteed price to mill owners. The simple answer in my opinion is elimination of regulation, no minimum support price and no export subsidies. Let market forces determine sugar cane buying and selling and the most efficient survive.

This opens up a much bigger question of agricultural policy making, rural poverty alleviation and our fixation with our 4 crops. Cotton, Wheat, Rice, Sugar cane.

So is Tareen guilty of using his power and influence to capture or influence sugar policy and regulation to benefit the sugar mills? Perhaps not capture, but influence certainly!

However, does that mean he did anything illegal? I don’t think so. I think he and others like him do what every businessperson does, and try to influence policy and regulation in favour of their sector’s interest. It’s called lobbying. In Tareen’s case he was far more effective given his political clout and that many in positions of power were directly beholden to him for their political success.

But what about policy capture? Is it wrong? Of course it is. Not only is it wrong, it is unethical and immoral but unfortunately, not illegal.

Should this policy capture be allowed?

No! Absolutely not!

Policy or regulatory capture by elites and special interest groups, whether feudals, politicians, businesspeople, the judiciary, media or the military, is a poison. More on this in my subsequent pieces.

Will Jehangr Tareen turn against his former leader, comrade and close friend?

I don’t think so. If he does, he will commit political suicide. But I also think Imran is being misinformed and misguided and he needs to step back and take a fresh look.

Over the next several weeks I will address the remaining two questions about Imran’s coming into his own skin and whether we’re seeing the start of a genuine path to major reform to eliminate Pakistan’s elite capture.

Till next week!

Haider Mehdi is a Geo political commentator / blogger on National and International affairs