During the Great War, when much of the Russian Left toed the Czarist line of defending the motherland, Vladimir Lenin made his revolution by opposing the ‘imperialist war’, correctly judging the Czarist ‘peasant army’ was crumbling and the disaffected people were ready to heed his voice. Can we say the same for Imran Khan? Has he, too, correctly guessed that the people are ready to follow him, given the crumbling credibility of his main political rivals — the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)?
Well, I hope the readers will excuse me for drawing this strange analogy between Lenin and Imran Khan, as there is nothing common between the two. Lenin was a great revolutionary and theoretician and he transformed history and the political map of the world for all times to come, whereas Imran Khan may be anything but a revolutionary. But then what is he — a Bhutto, Nehru, Mahathir or Erdogan? Actually, he is none of these.
He is at best a politician who is as much a product of his doggedness as the miracle of our unique political system, which for all its outward orientations remains quintessentially the same in its essence, i.e. elitist. The elitist culture is different in terms of political economy. Unlike the modern bourgeoisie that vies for political power by the dint of its leverage over capital and means of production, the traditional elite is simply a by-product of the state’s continuous patronage system.
The rising Indian capitalist and corporate powers can be put in the national bourgeoisie category because of their vast contribution to the political economy, and hence their increasing influence over governance and policy-making. No wonder, the Indian National Congress is closely identified with and also blamed for patronising these powers. On the other hand, the best example of the traditional elite is the various shades of the Muslim League, which have been dominated and patronised by the powerful security establishment right from the start.
It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who first broke ranks with the traditional elites in the twilight days of his mentor, Ayub Khan. His socialist jargon and maverick appeal immediately caught the popular fancy. Soon, the masses came to love him and joined his party, the PPP, in droves. But even the populist Bhutto did not risk breaking with the entire lot of traditional elites, though he went the whole hog against the ‘exploiting’ business and industrial barons, nationalising their financial and industrial assets.
But he also subtly co-opted a powerful section of the traditional elites comprising the rural landed gentry, the old retainers of the establishment, as a countervailing force both to the urban capitalists and the insider leftists. Thus, he put himself in a precarious balance between the pro-status quo and the progressive forces. In turn, the rural elites used Bhutto’s popular sloganeering vehicle, the PPP, to ride over the most radical of all times, the 1970s, when socialism was a universal gospel in the third world. But alas, in the end Bhutto could not keep the balance. His natural allies, the leftist progressive forces, deserted him being sick of his revisionist policies, particularly his backtracking on the socialist programme, and his class co-travellers, the old retainers of the establishment, eventually lynched him.
Much of the rural feudal elites ditched the PPP after Bhutto was sent to the gallows by General Ziaul Haq, forcing Bhutto’s daughter and political legatee, Benazir Bhutto, to turn to a new class of middle-class cadres. But soon when the tide turned against military rule, much of the rural elite returned to Benazir Bhutto’s PPP. And yet again a sizeable number of it switched to General Musharraf when she went into self-exile.
The PML-N, another mainstream party representing much of urban Punjab, met with more or less the same fate, if not worse than its counterpart, the PPP. Here, it was the traditional state-sponsored capitalists who switched sides at the behest of their benefactor, the security establishment. Thus, with the banishment of the Sharif family from the country in the late 1990s, almost the entire PML-N was hijacked overnight by the Chuadhries of Gujrat to provide a civilian masquerade to General Musharraf’s military regime. But as soon as Musharraf left the scene, the PML-N’s ranks again began to swell with the old central Punjab’s elites, leaving the PML-Q in the lurch.
Elitist politics is not necessarily class-based. Certain middle and lower middle-class parties have also acted in the same elitist manner: siding with the powerful establishment at the cost of democracy and radical reforms. Traditionally, the religious right and lately the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) have also coalesced with the state elites, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, in helping maintain the basic structure of the security state intact. Musharraf’s two most powerful allies were the MQM and the PML-Q but the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal’s (MMA’s) government in then NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was no less supportive of his dispensation.
Tragically, the removal of the two relatively more anti-status quo Bhuttos from the political scene has changed the ethos of Zardari’s PPP. It has virtually consecrated elitist politics in the name of ‘reconciliation’, completely ignoring the damage that it caused to it and to the country. As a result, the PPP has had to make a huge compromise on political ethics and governance in its quest to accommodate the insatiable elitist thirst for power and pelf.
Imran Khan, the new avatar of change, is now treading on the same path as once Bhutto did. The traditional elites have started to join him seeing the tilt of popular sentiments towards him. Their seemingly larger-than-life images seem to be pretty much impressing the Khan. But it is a trap he must avoid. It is they who need him more than he needs them now. They would be his greatest hurdle in bringing about the ‘change’ that he envisions for the country. Coming from the landed, financial, business and trading classes, they would hinder economic and fiscal reforms, they would resist redistribution of wealth and resources, and they would protect this malfunctioning and corrupt system of which they are the greatest beneficiaries.
Moreover, they would hog all the key government positions leveraging their experience and know-how, denying the new and clean cadres to become part of the new system that Imran Khan wants to introduce after his electoral ‘tsunami’. But alas, Imran Khan too, like his predecessor popular leaders, seems to be enamoured of these powerful personages and banking on their varied political exposure and deep tentacles in the power grid. He does not seem to care that many of these fair-weather cocks would turn tail when the wind starts blowing from the opposite side.
Imran Khan is allowing the quintessentially pro-status quo elites to become part of his quest for a radical change in the country’s politico-economic system. The Bhuttos could not dance with the ever gyrating elites, can the Khan? Very unlikely.
The writer is a lawyer and academic. He can be reached at [email protected]