Mohammad Waseem
This chapter seeks to understand the role of political parties as an expression of the current patterns of conflict in Pakistan. Political parties operate in the field according to the established as well as unfolding rules of the game and thus provide road signs on the way to understanding the inner dynamics of the system. The first section of this chapter outlines the profile of political parties encompassing issues and policies and their modes of expression, from legislative debates to aggressive political participation, such as mob violence or target killings. The second section deals with five parties that matter in the perpetual power game on top—the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the Pakistan Muslim League—Nawaz (PMLN), the Pakistan Tehreeke Insaaf (PTI), the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and the Awami National Party (ANP). The third section focuses on smaller parties, including the two Islamic parties—as well as miniscule parties operating on the margins of the system. Their importance lies essentially in the way they lay out the turf and thus give expression to the ambitions, aspirations, grievances, and frustrations of groups and communities that are not fully represented in the system. These observations bring out the specific features of political parties in the way they are poised to shape the contours of state power and to contribute to the national discourse.
This chapter deals with political parties as they operate out in the field, raising contentious issues, mobilizing the public in pursuit of their disparate agendas, and taking positions on matters of domestic and foreign policy. Political parties typically function both within and outside the Parliament as well as in the electoral and nonelectoral contexts. The historical research on political parties of Pakistan generally deals with them as parliamentary and electoral entities.1 There are few studies of individual parties in terms of their mass appeal, patterns of recruitment, organizational structure, and changing ideological positions.2 However, the task of understanding the political crisis in the country in 2012–2013 becomes easier if we look at political parties in terms of their day-to-day activity or “normal” politics, distinct from the “extraordinary” politics in and around elections that compresses issues, policies, and the group dynamics in a mode of hyperactivity during the campaign.3
BEYOND ORGANIZATIONAL DIMENSION
Although the organizational route to analysis of political parties has the potential for explaining their resilience, there is a need for understanding their political behavior in terms of their patterns of leadership, public discourse, and relevance for the political system. The organizational approach to political parties such as the MQM, the Jama’at-e-Islami (JI), and the ANP is now part of the conventional wisdom.4 However, the high organizational potential of these parties has a differential impact on their public standing, their electoral support, and their capacity to shape politics. For example, the JI was never an electoral party of any significance in terms of government formation at the federal or provincial level, except during the untypical and arguably maneuvered elections in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)—today Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP)—in 2002. The JI boycotted the 2008 elections in protest against Musharraf’s maneuvered election as president in October 2007, followed by an emergency on November 3 when he sacked scores of judges and packed higher courts with his hand-picked judges. The party’s political significance has plummeted since. Similarly, the MQM’s acknowledged institutional potential notwithstanding, it has become the most controversial party in the country. In 2011, Zulfikar Mirza, the ex-interior minister of the PPP government in Sindh, broke ranks with his party and declared the MQM a terrorist organization and its leader Altaf Hussain a killer. As opposed to the JI and MQM, the three mainstream parties PPP, PML-N, and PTI have a lax organizational structure characterized by a gap of communication between leaders and workers, absence of meaningful party elections, and a low level of party discipline. However, the PPP and PML-N along with their breakaway factions managed to get 70 percent of the total vote on average for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and form governments at the federal level, often in coalition with smaller parties. There seems to be a poor fix between the organizational input and the electoral output of political parties in Pakistan.
In this chapter, I propose to look into party politics in Pakistan beyond an organizational matrix and focus on their day-to-day operational dynamics at and around the point of intersection between the party on the one hand and its perception and projection of issues and policies and modes of expression and mobilization on the other. What is important is the way the party leadership feels obliged to opt for public action through a public statement, a press release, a TV interview, a press conference, a public rally, or a “long march” to the Parliament house in Islamabad, the Punjab Assembly, or a Sufi shrine, such as Data Darbar in Lahore. This requires an analysis of the policy behind selection of the issue in question, the strategy behind the timing of action, and the decision about a joint action sponsored by an alliance of parties or a solo flight. The action can pursue a longer-term ideological goal, such as establishment of sharia in the country, or a medium-term objective, such as stopping the war against terror. Also, one finds a series of rallies sparked by immediate causes, like the murder of two Pakistanis by American spy Raymond Davis and his subsequent release from jail in early 2011 or the U.S. drone attacks on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
On the one hand, party leadership decides on political action or nonaction in the perspective of the space provided by the political system. On the other hand, the agenda and the course of action of a political party are underscored by the ideological, factional, and personal input into the decision-making channels on top. The former reflects civic liberties and political freedoms available to parties and groups for expression of their opinions and pursuit of their strategies. The latter focuses on the specific ways of understanding, and responding to, the public issues adopted by various political parties that lead to internal debate, cleavages between leaders and workers, and successive periods of readiness and restraint for coming out in the open and taking a public position. In this sense, this inquiry deals mainly but not exclusively with politics on the street.
A WEAK PARLIAMENT
We need to look at political parties beyond mere parliamentary entities. Parliament took a back seat during the process of democratization in Pakistan after the 2008 elections. It operated as a subordinate house vis-à-vis the executive, as opposed to, for example, the House of Commons, which operated as a coordinate house.5 Parliament took a delayed action, if at all, in the form of resolutions. In 2009, it passed a resolution for conducting peace negotiations with the Taliban in KP. However, it was followed by the military action in Swat and South Waziristan against the express wishes of public representatives. The decision of political parties in favor of making peace with the Taliban was prompted by factors other than ideological or policy preferences. For example, only a minority, the core Islamic elements on the floor, such as Jamiat-e Ulama-e Islam (JUI), wanted “peace” with the Taliban as a matter of policy. The relatively secular ANP government in Peshawar felt helpless in the face of the advancing march of the Taliban into large areas of Malakand Division and the killing of scores of its party men, with no indication of support from the general headquarters (GHQ) of the army in Rawalpindi for launching a counterterrorist operation. Thus, it opted for the “peace” resolution to avoid confrontation with the militants. That meant that it virtually ceded territory to a proto-Taliban group Tanzeem Nifaz Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) as a “no-go area” for the provincial government and ultimately for the state.
The PPP government in Islamabad (2008–2013) voted for “peace” to avoid the opposition propaganda for not wanting “peace” with the Muslim brethren against the “infidel” Americans. Also, it wanted to restore the writ of the state in the face of terrorist operations. It wanted the Parliament to endorse its perceived policy of nonaction against the Taliban and its ally TNSM. Only the MQM abstained, mainly because it wanted to attract the attention of the diplomatic community by creating a profile of a secular party for itself. Others, especially the PML-N and PML-Q (Quaid-e-Azam), similarly tried to save their skin from criticism of Islamic and anti-American groups. It can be argued that the resolution expressed not the political will to go for peace with the Taliban but the fear of being labeled as anti-Islamic. That explains why the subsequent military operation did not elicit any negative response from the leading parliamentary parties PPP, PML-N, PML-Q, ANP, and MQM. In 2011, the Parliament voted for stopping the U.S. drone attacks on the militants’ hideouts in the FATA and thus provided a platform for expressing an increasingly popular demand among the articulate sections of the public. Neither the government nor the opposition believed that the resolution would make any difference as long as the security apparatus approved these attacks in the framework of the strategic alliance between Pakistan and the United States. No serious negotiations between the two allies took place on this issue at any time.
On a different note, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment brought about significant changes in the Constitution by amending eighty-nine articles and transferring forty out of forty-seven subjects from the Concurrent List to the residual category controlled by provinces.6 The amendment was rooted in the deliberations of the Parliamentary Committee for Constitutional Reform steered by Senator Raza Rabbani. It arrived at a consensus after a painstaking process of agreement, disagreement, and compromise between the party representatives in the Committee. When Nawaz Sharif publicly aired his reservations about the change of name of NWFP to Pakhtunkhwa, the media criticized his move as backstabbing. Nawaz Sharif was obliged to step back and agree to a compromise formula by adding Khyber to the name. The Parliament eventually and quietly passed the amendment without any fireworks, in view of the prior understanding between political parties off the floor. The behavior of political parties in Pakistan is typically more representative of their policy preferences on political and constitutional issues as expressed and crystalized outside the Parliament rather than inside it.
In March 2012, the Parliament again picked up the initiative to redefine the U.S.–Pakistan strategic alliance. A series of setbacks in relations between the two countries forced a reconsideration of commitment to the partnership in the war against terror. It started with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Abbottabad operation on May 2, 2012, which located and killed Osama bin Laden, and came to a head with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) attack on Salala check post inside Pakistan territory, killing twenty-four soldiers. Islamabad retaliated by putting a halt to the NATO supplies that passed through Pakistan and got the Shamsie air base—that was used for flying drones—vacated by the United States. The parliamentary committee for national strategy recommended to the National Assembly that the drone attacks and NATO supplies, among other things, be stopped. The mainstream current of anti-Americanism was led by Islamic parties—some of them banned as terrorist organizations—and political leadership on the right led by Imran Khan, leader of the PTI. The media and the opposition claimed that the decision in this regard had already been taken and that the parliamentary debate was just an exercise in churning out an expression of the national will in a formal sense. In June 2012, the Supreme Court disqualified Prime Minister Gilani for contempt of court, in the midst of a perceived clash of the two institutions of judiciary and Parliament. The PPP was obliged to elect Raja Pervez Ashraf as a lame duck chief executive up to the elections.
BEYOND ELECTIONS: DYNAMICS OF A POLITICAL SOCIETY
A study of party politics in an electoral framework dwells on the analysis of the election system, the campaign, the manifestos, and the content and style of mobilization of people in pursuit of victory at the polls. While an election carries immense explanatory potential, it compresses the group dynamics into the mold of patron–client relations in countries such as Pakistan. The leadership seeks to maximize its gains in the number of votes and seats as a short-term objective, irrespective of its relevance for the longer-term issues of policy. Thus, after the 2008 elections in Pakistan, the two historically competitive political entities, the PPP and the PML(N), with more or less defined—though increasingly blurred—ideological positions on the left and right of the center, settled down along their traditional standpoints on policy matters. It is the expression, projection, and manipulation of profile and policy in a nonelectoral context that brings out the internal and lasting dynamics of political parties. Rather than formal party positions, it is the informal but sustained political attitudes that define politics in Pakistan, as elsewhere.
Accordingly, this chapter deals with political attitudes as expressed through party action or nonaction in the period between the two elections. It covers the PPP-led government after the 2008 elections and the PML-N government after the 2013 elections. The political situation in Pakistan has been conducive to a relatively unshackled and unconstrained expression of opinion and mobilization of people through the media.7 This phenomenon can be ascribed to two major factors, one structural and the other operational. Structurally speaking, the country has been in a postmilitary democratization phase that was underscored by tense relations between the civilian and military wings of the state. Ironically, this phenomenon indirectly opened up space for a “free” media that has been increasingly critical of the both the PPP and PML-N governments but that spared the army and, to a large extent, judiciary. In the period under consideration, the media, especially television, often lambasted political parties and their leaders. The military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), together known as the “establishment,” have been understood to be in favor of a media that was critical of the civilian wing of the state. The political opposition thrived on freedom of action and expression—ranging from tabling motions against the government’s actions and policies on the floor of elected assemblies to arranging rallies, demonstrations, and strikes. The phenomenon of a weak civilian government operating under the vigilance of the army characterized the post-Musharraf period of civilianization after 2008, largely following the Brazilian model.8 The media generally deferred to the military establishment in terms of operating within the broad contours of foreign policy and defense strategy. This pattern came to a peak during the media war between India and Pakistan after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. At home, the media took on the elected government forcefully, given the latter’s insecure position in the power structure.
The fact that political parties of various shades have been able to operate relatively freely in recent years provides a rationale to dwell on their policy opinions, internal squabbles, competition for public vote and attention, and ideological orientations as covered by the media. The establishment has been generally perceived to be vigilant about a civilian government from behind the scenes. That has kept the latter under constant pressure and constrained its space in the domain of public policy. The gap between the civilian and military wings of the state provided space for social and political movements, sit-ins, shutter-down strikes (closing shop), and other forms of political agitation. In this way, the political dynamics of the society found a coherent expression through legislative activity, street demonstrations, and aggressive political participation in the form of militant activities including extortion, murder, and arson. Pakistan under the PPP and PML-N governments presented a scene of relatively unconstrained mass mobilization by political parties and its expression through the media.
MAJOR PARTIES AS CONTENDERS FOR POWER
Pakistan is a multiparty democracy of some standing. There were forty-nine political parties registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan in 2008 and 216 in 2013.9 The discussion in this section focuses on the mode of action and public profile of the PPP, PML-N, PTI, MQM, and ANP, that is, the parties that made a serious bid for power. Other political parties either did not have the credentials or did not rear reasonable ambitions for government formation at the federal or provincial level.
PPP
The PPP is the most widely researched party in Pakistan.10 Its organizational issues in the beginning of its present stint in office revolved around the question of whether the Central Executive Committee (CEC) or the informal core committee—President Asif Ali Zardari’s version of a kitchen cabinet—should make crucial decisions about party matters.11 The CEC formally approved the official move to sponsor a UN probe into Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and showed concern about the unwieldy cabinet size. It adopted the strategy for nonconfrontation with the judiciary even as it claimed that the latter had been politicized and that (intelligence) agencies controlled its deliberations. The party high command conveyed messages to party activists through the CEC, for example, to forbid them from commenting on conspiracy theories that the army or ISI—specifically their chiefs, Generals Kayani and Pasha, respectively—sought to destabilize the PPP government.12 One member, Qayum Jatoi, was sacked for criticism of the army and judiciary. The CEC functioned as the nerve center of the party in terms of acknowledgment of the privilege and loyalty of its members. Aitzaz Ahsan’s membership in the CEC was suspended during the lawyers’ movement against the PPP government in 2008–2009 and then restored in a move to co-opt him in the face of street agitation led by Nawaz Sharif. Aitzaz staged a comeback in 2012 as lawyer for a beleaguered prime minister who was embroiled in a contempt-of-court case for not writing a letter to the Swiss banks for investigation into President Zardari’s accounts. In this way, the CEC remained a convenient platform for public recognition of party stalwarts as well as for projection of the message from the party leadership.
The PPP has a long tradition of overlap between party faithfuls and personal faithfuls, representing the ideological wing and the power elite, respectively.13 The former often harked back to the “true message” of Z. A. Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto and thus functioned as a de facto conscience keeper of the party that represented party cadres and workers. They started a Bhutto Legacy Movement in Peshawar in pursuit of a demand to implement the party manifesto that promised to serve the poor and the destitute. They planned a province-wide tour, demanded a party convention to solve the workers’ problems, and expressed apprehensions about the decline of the popularity graph of the party. Workers asked the leadership to hold party elections and regularly meet them instead of appeasing the non-PPP coalition partners. They showed a measure of disappointment after first participating in the movement for restoration of judges in 2007–2008 and then facing the dilemma of supporting Zardari, who similarly resisted the return of Chief Justice Chaudhry and others to the Supreme Court.14 For its part, the party leadership was apprehensive about playing the workers’ card. President Zardari first approved a rally of the PPP Youth Organization to protest against the high-handedness of the judiciary but then stopped it for fear that it might run wild and direct anger against the judges or even assault the premises of the Supreme Court.15 Dissidents claimed that the perceived communication gap between the leaders and workers was a deliberate strategy to keep workers on their toes.
As the tension between the judiciary and the executive took a turn for the worse, the cochair of the PPP, President Zardari, demanded resignation from all the party legislators at the federal and provincial levels. The party leadership feared a “conspiracy” and sought resignations as a contingency plan to put its own house in order and slap its authority over the parliamentary wing. The idea was that if an in-house arrangement leads to a new coalition-based government, the PPP legislators should not be part of it. In the event, 106 members of the Punjab Assembly belonging to the PPP submitted their “loyalty affidavits,” if not proper resignations, to President Zardari.16 The PPP feared a loss of majority on the floor of the Parliament. It occupied 128 seats in the National Assembly, along with coalition partners at thirteen for the ANP, twenty-five MQM, eight JUI, five Pakistan Muslim League—Functional (PML-F), and seventeen independents, bringing the total to 193. But the JUI left the coalition after its minister Azam Swati implicated the PPP minister Syed Hamid Raza Kazmi in the hajj scam and both were sacked. The MQM resigned thrice from the treasury benches in protest against the alleged nonacceptance of its demands that kept the incumbent government insecure in the game of numbers. The PPP felt obliged to co-opt the PML-Q—the erstwhile “king’s party” in the government. The old party cadres and workers had long identified the late patriarch of the present leadership of the PML-Q—Choudhry Zahooor Ilahi—with President Zia, especially as he had publicly endorsed the execution of Z. A. Bhutto in 1979. Later, he was killed allegedly by the militant wing of the PPP, Al-Zulfikar, led by Bhutto’s son Murtaza. Zardari himself called it the Qatil (murderer) League immediately after Benazir’s assassination in December 2007. Not surprisingly, Zardari’s move elicited a negative reaction in the party ranks.
The classical description of the PPP as a populist party holds ground even four decades after its inception in 1967.17 In the cynical version of this approach, the party is understood to be unwilling to go by any rules or regulations and norms or traditions. Critics pointed to its lack of substance and vision and consistent play on the theme of victimhood because of the unnatural deaths of Z. A. Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto, along with her two brothers. The idiom of the party’s spokespersons continued to be laced with hyperboles and projection of fatality as immortality.18 The party maintained that Benazir, through her assassination, signed the social contract with her blood.19 Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari, as the new party leader, managed to keep the party united, led its triumphant march to government formation after the 2008 elections through a coalitional arrangement, and successfully mobilized support for his own election as president. He was considered a trusted ally by Washington and somebody that GHQ was willing to work with. He championed the process of transformation of the political infrastructure by establishing provincial autonomy and canceling the presidential powers to dissolve the National Assembly through the Eighteenth Amendment. In a series of political moves—the Ninth National Finance Commission Award, the Gilgit-Baltistan Order, and the Baluchistan initiative—Zardari changed the political landscape in a longer-term perspective. Under him, the Constitution regained some of its original character by shedding various provisions periodically inserted by military rulers and indeed moved considerably further in the direction of provincial autonomy.20
Despite all this, Zardari became the most controversial elected president in Pakistan’s history. Soon after the honeymoon period, he was subjected to severe criticism from various actors on the political stage. The Supreme Court declared Musharraf’s National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) null and void and asked the PPP government to open up corruption cases against the president in the Swiss courts.21 As the judiciary asserted its power, the pro-democracy elements acutely feared the crumbling of the civilian edifice of authority. The media projected the message of the president’s alleged corruption all around and charged that Zardari had sold out to the United States by pursuing the war against terror in the American interest, thus compromising national sovereignty. Public anger was reserved for the unsatisfactory performance of the PPP government relating to an all-embracing price hike, periodic shortages of foodstuffs, electricity, petrol, and natural gas, and deterioration of the security situation because of terrorist attacks. A Pew Research Center poll found that Zardari’s approval ratings were 20 percent in 2010, comparable to a 17 percent approval rating for the United States; in contrast, 61 percent of those polled approved of General Kayani, and 71 percent approved of Nawaz Sharif.22 The leaders of the PML-N, PTI, JI, and other opposition parties accused Zardari of manipulation, jugglery, duplicity, and Machiavellian foul play. A columnist in the News found the PPP flotilla leaky, shaky, and rickety, led by “Admiral Asif Ali, through his masterly trims, timely turnings of the tiller, frequent adjustments in the rudder and the keel,” and charged that the PPP government was in survival mode, constantly fighting fires rather than governing.23
PML-N
The PML-N that formed the government after the 2013 elections is a legatee of the All India Muslim League in British India. That party was divided into a dozen factions bearing various suffixes indicating the names of factional leaders. After Zia died in an air crash in August 1988, there emerged two rival factions of the ruling Muslim League—the “king’s party”—led by the ex-prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo and Punjab’s chief minister Nawaz Sharif. The latter faction emerged as a separate party in 1992. The PML-N is a mirror image of the PPP in terms of dynastic leadership, its vast baggage of corruption charges, a history of dismissal of its previous governments at the hands of both the army (1999) and the civilian president (1993), a weak organizational structure, and vulnerability to factionalism induced by extraparliamentary forces. The party has retained its ideological position on the right of the center, its power base in Punjab, and its appeal in the urban centers for the last two decades. In 2011, Nawaz Sharif took a public position against the political role of the army. His new stance drew on his unceremonial exit from power at the hands of Musharraf a decade ago, followed by imprisonment—including solitary confinement for three months—and long years of exile to Saudi Arabia. He returned in 2007 with a commitment to never encourage, accept, or abet the army’s role in politics. Nawaz Sharif kept himself distant from any move to topple the PPP government because he saw in it a return to the army’s role as king maker and his own subservient role as an elected prime minister in a future scenario. This realization shaped the PML-N’s attitude toward the PPP government in an essentially noncombative framework, characterized by reluctance to engineer a move to destabilize the civilian setup that would lead to surrender of initiative back to the army. Some argued that the PML-N’s commitment not to upset the cart let the PPP-led coalition off the hook despite its bad governance.
Nawaz Sharif was exposed to the Islamization program of Zia as part of the government in Punjab from 1981 to 1988. In 1988, he contested elections from the platform of an alliance with JI called Islami Jamhoori Ittehad put together by ISI against the PPP. As prime minister (1990–1993), he got the Shariat Bill passed by the National Assembly. His government was dissolved before he could steer the bill through the Senate. His ideological grooming under the Saudi government for nearly a decade further pushed him to a mission-mantled approach to politics. Disparate conservative elements who opposed Musharraf’s self-serving secular posturing and partnership with the United States in the war against terror found in Nawaz Sharif—Musharraf’s nemesis—an Islamic and putatively anti-American alternative. Nawaz Sharif remained somewhat noncommittal about the role of the Taliban in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks. His brother, Punjab’s chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, made a public appeal to the Taliban to spare the province in view of their shared struggle in the past. The media lambasted him for showing empathy with terrorists. The banned jihadi parties claimed to have contributed to the victory of the PML-N candidates in the 2008 elections. According to WikiLeaks, Shahbaz Sharif tipped a banned jihadi party, Jamaat-ut-Dawa, about the impending move of the United Nations to freeze its account. Musharraf claimed that Nawaz Sharif was a closet Taliban. President Zardari referred to him as Maulvi (cleric) Nawaz Sharif during his address in Nodero in July 2011. Conversely, Nawaz Sharif has shown sensitivity to the need for a modern, not orthodox, Islamic system, a tolerant and plural society, as well as regional peace. When Nawaz Sharif referred to Ahmedis, the followers of a heretical sect, as brothers during the campaign for a by-election in Chakwal, Islamic groups boycotted him. He was also criticized by a certain anti-India lobby called the “Pakistan movement” group for speaking in favor of friendship and opening of trade with India.
The PML-N brought back several members from its huge breakaway faction, PML-Q, whom Musharraf had co-opted. In the Punjab Assembly, these PML-Q co-optees helped the PML-N keep its minority government in place after it eased the PPP members out of the coalition in 2008. Under Zardari, the PML-N’s political stance toward him remained unclear. Sometimes it declared that it would not support the replacement of the PPP government by a “national government”—a euphemism for a military-sponsored political arrangement. At other times, it hinted at supporting change. Sometimes it demanded midterm elections but later feared that these would be mediated through the army. The party demanded that Musharraf should be brought back from abroad for trial through Interpol. Its charge sheet against Musharraf included his misadventure in Kargil in 1999; illegal takeover on October 12, 1999; war against his own people (meaning the war against terror); use of the National Accountability Bureau to blackmail politicians into submission; murder of the Baluch leader Akbar Bugti; atrocities perpetrated on the Baluch activists, including abducting and killing them; and operation against the Red Mosque in Islamabad on the occasion of the “Israeli-Zionist Bush Cheney Junta of War Criminals.”24 Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif was reported to have had a secret meeting with Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Kayani that was subsequently disapproved of by Nawaz Sharif. Shahbaz’s statement that the army and judiciary should play their role as stakeholders in the stability of the political system created a backlash in the media and political circles.
The conflict between the PPP government and the Supreme Court provided the PML-N an opportunity to keep pressure on the former by upholding the cause of independence of the judiciary. In 2009, the PML-N put its full weight in favor of reinstatement of Chief Justice Chaudhry after Shahbaz’s government collapsed as a result of a court ruling. The party questioned Zardari’s eligibility for the presidential election in 2008 in the light of the NRO, presidential immunity, and appointment of judges. Nawaz Sharif faced opposition within the party for compromising parliamentary sovereignty by encouraging a rally in favor of the Supreme Court. All along, the fear of passing the initiative back to the army kept Nawaz Sharif from burning his bridges in conflict with the PPP. The PTI leader Imran Khan accused him of making a secret deal with Zardari to keep the status quo.
Nawaz Sharif filed a case in the Supreme Court in November 2011 after the “Memogate” scandal put President Zardari in the dock for “conspiring” with the United States to save his government from the army, allegedly in exchange for strategic cooperation that covered access to nuclear installations. Nawaz Sharif pleaded with the Supreme Court to investigate the matter. Meanwhile, Zardari was able to sort out matters with the top brass that was itself under pressure due to allegations about the ISI chief’s maneuverings in certain Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, launching a military coup straight after the Abbottabad operation in May 2011. As the court case lingered on into May 2012, Nawaz Sharif settled for a compromise with the PPP government in the impending Senate elections. Meanwhile, Imran Khan denigrated the two leaders as plunderers, cheats, and wheelers and dealers.
The PML-Q faction got fifty seats in the 2008 elections. It was divided into three factions—one joining Zardari, another Musharraf in his reincarnation as a leader in exile, and the third (Like-minded Group) Nawaz Sharif. In June 2012, the PML-Q—led by Choudhary Shujaat Husain and Pervez Illahi—enjoyed a crucial role as king maker because it carried sufficient numbers for the PPP to put together a majority in the National Assembly to elect the new prime minister after Gilani was disqualified by the Supreme Court. They even vetoed the two PPP candidates for that position, Ahmed Mukhtar and Qamar Zaman Kaira, and instead supported Raja Pervez Ashraf. The PML-Q virtually collapsed in the 2013 elections.
PTI
Imran Khan’s PTI was virtually a one-man party for fifteen years, until 2011. None of the mainstream political leaders acknowledged its role as a significant political actor nor sought alliance with it. Imran was generally dismissed as a product of intelligence agencies and as a creation of the media. But all this did not render him irrelevant for party politics in Pakistan because he gave public expression to the deep concerns of a large number of people from the educated middle class. They found in him a janitor who would cleanse the Augean stables of politics in the country. He upheld the Mosaic myth of leading his nation to the Promised Land. Under the post-2008 democratic dispensation, he was able to regroup quite a few like-minded people around him. He carried out a blitzkrieg on television, condemning the leading politicians of corruption, bad governance, and total neglect of the downtrodden masses. Although Imran’s party has its own CEC that meets periodically, a published manifesto, and a youth wing called Insaf Students Federation, it lacks the trappings of a typical political party in terms of a viable and stable hierarchical structure, ideological and policy orientation of cadres and workers, and network of influential locals as potential winners in an electoral contest.
Imran’s main profile is one of a rebel, an angry person who challenges authority in social, economic, and political domains of public policy. He finds the system at a dead end, representing a rotten status quo that would eventually pave the way to revolution.25 A recurrent theme of his speeches is the need for change in the system. Critics found in it change for change’s sake because of Imran’s lack of clear thinking about his policy objectives. Imran saw a civil disobedience movement against bad governance round the corner, corruption as cancer of the society, and revolution through ballot as the way out. He had campaigned for Musharraf for his controversial presidential referendum in 2002 but fell out with him when he was not given a leading role in the subsequent civilian setup. In 2007, he reemerged as a firebrand orator on the TV screen attacking Musharraf. He was part of the All Pakistan Democratic Alliance that boycotted the 2008 elections. While the PML-N and the JUI later opted to take part in elections, Imran and others were left in the lurch. Imran incessantly accused the Zardari government of selling Pakistan’s sovereignty to the United States by joining the war against terror and demanded “liberation from American slavery.”26 He promised to tackle the problem of terrorism in ninety days. He took a tough stand on the American spy Raymond Davis during his trial in court in 2011. After Davis’s release, he castigated the government for complicity with the United States. The PTI filed a petition in court against the U.S. drone attacks and threatened to launch a march on Islamabad if these attacks did not stop. Imran demanded the release of Pakistani expatriate Dr. Afia Siddiqui, who was awarded a sentence of 86 years by a U.S. court for attacking American troops in Kabul.
Imran constantly admonished Nawaz Sharif for paying only Rs 5,000 as income tax and sixty-one Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) for paying no income tax at all.27 Imran heaped invectives against Zardari as a corrupt person, criticized Musharraf’s NRO for exonerating the former from legal action for corruption, and demanded to reopen cases against Musharraf. Imran persistently demanded midterm elections to get rid of the incumbent ruling setup based on a bogus National Assembly.28 Ideologically, Imran continued to be close to Islamic parties. He publicly rallied with them against the United States. The PTI manifesto did not criticize Islamic extremism and suicide bombing. He wanted no change in the controversial Blasphemy Law. He appealed to “jeaned jihadis,” that is, the conservative educated and professional youth with a modern veneer.29 On October 30, 2011, he organized a public rally in the famous Minar Pakistan Park in Lahore, which upgraded his profile as a national leader and left a mark on the youth in particular and the articulate sections of the public in general. Dozens of high-profile disgruntled members of the PPP, PML-N, PML-Q, JUI-Fazl ur Rehman (JUI-F), ANP, and PML-F joined the PTI in a wave that was incessantly termed by Imran as a “tsunami.” He claimed that he would form the next government, that he would start a civil war if he was denied victory through a rigged election, and that he had now a credible number of heavyweights within the party for winning the election. However, various political leaders and commentators alleged that he was the new horse fielded by ISI. The media termed him “Taliban Khan.” The traditional leadership of all shades woke up to Imran’s emergence on the national scene. As a leader, Imran evoked two contradictory responses. At one end, he was accorded a pivotal role in starting a process of revolution as Mr. Clean. He was accredited with “personal and political credibility, integrity, compassion, dedication, fairness and justice,” with credentials as a “managerial guru” and as a “compassionate visionary.”30 He was admired for introducing transformational politics as an expression of his doctrine of political change. At the other end, he was seen as a Taliban apologist kowtowing Islamic parties, of duplicity in his personal life, of sponsoring a cult of personality, and of being a revolutionary with “fundamental contradictions, u-turns and half-baked theories.”31 Imran thought of himself in the same vein as Z. A. Bhutto and his meteoric rise in 1970. While political pundits estimated that he would get fifteen to twenty-five seats in the National Assembly in the 2013 elections, the PTI’s own estimates put the party’s fortune at a hundred seats from Punjab alone. However, the elections produced a major surprise: the ascendancy of the PTI as the second largest party by vote and the third by seats in the National Assembly.
The MQM shares a culture of sacrifice with the PPP. While the PPP focuses on its martyred leaders, the Bhuttos, the MQM constantly refers to its “martyred” party workers in the context of the military operations of 1992–1994 and 1995 as well as targeted killings before and after. Unlike the Sindhi, Pakhtun, and Baluch nationalist parties that identify with their respective provinces and claimed historical roots, the MQM and its Mohajir constituency miss out on both geography and history. This community suffered a gradual decline in its superordinate position in jobs and services over two generations after independence.32 The MQM has developed a sense of persecution all around.33 It alone among ethnic parties faced conspiracy theories about its sponsorship by the army. It was speculated that the 1983 Movement for Restoration of Democracy agitation led by the Sindhis as a belated reaction to the execution of Z. A. Bhutto in 1979 pushed Zia to create a Mohajir party in Sindh.34 Later the MQM joined Musharraf and put together a ruling coalition in Karachi along with the PML-Q in 2003. After the 2008 and 2013 elections, it formed a coalition with the PPP that was aborted soon after, in the earlier elections more than once.
In 2010, its leader, Altaf Hussain, publicly asked the “patriotic generals” to act against the corrupt government in martial law–like operations and referred to Charles de Gaulle’s model to cleanse society.35 He also asked the Supreme Court to order the army to move against the corrupt politicians and “feudals” under Article 190 of the Constitution. The MQM faced numerous imponderables from the beginning. At a quarter of the population of Sindh, Mohajirs could never capture power in the province through elections without provincial reorganization. The idea of carving out a separate province of Karachi lingered on for half a century and again surfaced in May 2012. Nearly half of the Mohajir population of Sindh lived outside Karachi, while half of Karachi’s population was non-Mohajir. The project of a Karachi Province was expected to lead to a bloody partition process involving the cross-migration of Mohajirs and non-Mohajirs, as a mirror image of the cross-migration of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in 1947.
The MQM’s opponents accuse the party of indulging in militant activities against its political adversaries from rival parties, non-Mohajir ethnic communities—Pakhtuns and Sindhis—and its own breakaway faction, MQM-Hakiki.36 The party has been subjected to allegations of social violence by way of extortion from shopkeepers, traders, and industrialists. The electoral behavior of the MQM has been criticized for coercion, registration of bogus votes, and rigging the elections. The party continues to look for a larger role at the national level beyond its ethnic heartland. In 2010, it held conventions in Lahore, Multan, and Rawalpindi in an aborted move to demonstrate its nationwide appeal. The MQM wanted to revive Musharraf’s local bodies system. Because it could not control the provincial administration in Sindh, it wanted to secure the administration of the Mohajir-dominated urban centers of Karachi and Hyderabad.37 Musharraf had merged the five districts of Karachi into one urban district that remained the MQM stronghold for five years under its energetic mayor. In the face of the PPP government’s abrupt move to revive the old pattern after the MQM left the coalition for the third time in a row, the latter was obliged to bargain for the withdrawal of that initiative as a precondition for rejoining the coalition. In October 2012, the party was able to push for legislation for local government through the Sindh Assembly, which elicited a severe backlash from Sindhi nationalists.
The MQM often played the role of opposition within the ruling coalition on such issues as price hikes, the provisions of the annual budget relating to imposition of new taxes, increases in the general sales tax, wheat subsidies, the alleged rigging of elections in Gilgit-Baltistan, and not being allowed to contest and “win” two seats for the Azad Kashmir Assembly in 2011. The Sindhi dissident voices, led by the PPP’s interior minister Zulfikar Mirza, were overly fatigued by the perceived intransigence of the MQM, even as the federal government struggled to keep the party on board. In a TV address in September 2011, Altaf Hussain threatened to raise an army—Haq Prast Lashkar—to fight terrorism. The MQM’s pitched battles with the ANP—the party of Pakhtuns in Karachi—and the Sindhi–Baluch conundrum from Lyari continued to make headlines. During the 1990s and 2000s, the MQM’s street power set the pattern for other parties, especially the ANP and later the PPP, to develop their own activist groups. In 2014–2015, these parties were engaged in a war of attrition in the background of a police operation against militants and Altaf Hussain’s call for division of Sindh.
ANP
The ANP, as a Pakhtun nationalist party, fought to carve out a space for itself in Karachi, which is considered to be the biggest Pakhtun city, even surpassing Peshawar, the heartland and capital of KP. The ANP’s dynastic leadership goes back to the 1930s, when Abdul Ghaffar Khan took up the cause of Pakhtun nationalism.38 In Pakistan, both Ghaffar Khan and his son Wali Khan spent years in jail for their alleged anti-Pakistan stance and separatist ambitions. For its part, the party has been reduced from the leading provincial party called Khudai Khidmatgars, or Red Shirts, after the color of the party dress, in the decade before independence to one of the five contenders for power in KP. Talking with the ANP leadership is termed an “interview with history.”39 The ANP is a self-confessed secular party among the most religious community of Pakistan. The party became a target of the Taliban and proto-Taliban groups after they fled Afghanistan and landed in KP post-9/11. By July 2010, these groups had killed 485 leaders, cadres, and workers of that party, including the son of the information minister and two members of the KP Assembly. The party has been caught between its ideological heritage of nonviolence, a cultivated social conscience, and a commitment to renaissance of the Pakhtun language and literature on the one hand and Talibanization of the Pakhtun society in the 1990s and 2000s on the other.
President Zardari (2008–2013) delivered on his promise to change the name of the NWFP to Pakhtunkhwa through the Eighteenth Amendment and earned the lasting gratitude of the ANP. However, the PPP’s role in the three-way battle for street power in Karachi somewhat alienated the ANP’s leadership. The latter found the PPP overly committed to saving its coalition with the MQM. It wanted the army to control target killings in Karachi even as, traditionally, the ANP and the army have been poles apart. The latter considered the ANP’s predecessor, the National Awami Party (NAP), a traitor to the cause of national integration and fought with the Baluch guerillas from 1973 to 1977 after the dismissal of the NAP government in Quetta by Z. A. Bhutto. The Supreme Court declared the NAP to be against Pakistan’s integrity in 1975 and banned it. During the 1990s, the party reasserted itself on the political stage and entered into successive ruling coalitions led by the PPP and PML-N. The new generation of ANP cadres and workers carry autonomist ambitions for KP and look for security of life, jobs, and business in Karachi. Party politics in KP was not smooth under the ANP government (2008–2013), accompanying a downward trend of its popularity. In Karachi, the party’s constituency faced the usual dilemmas of the third generation of a migrant community, looking for space in the land of migration. The party was routed in the 2013 elections, winning a mere handful of seats in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly and one seat in the National Assembly.
SMALLER PARTIES: LAYING OUT THE TURF
Various “rightist” parties belonging to the Islamic and conservative political spectrum continue to operate on the margins of the system, largely carrying a message of transformation of the state and society. Several jihadi organizations proliferated in the society in the first decade of the twenty-first century, ironically under Musharraf, some allegedly sponsored by ISI. Shah Ahmad Noorani’s Jamiat Ulema Pakistan declined from the 1980s onward in the face of the rising MQM. Among the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA) parties, a Wahhabi outfit, Jamiat Ahl Hadith, enjoyed a limited appeal. The banned Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Fiqha Jafria, a Shia party, along with its breakaway faction, Tehrik-e-Jafria, and its new incarnation, Majlis Wahdatul Muslimeen, had no electoral prospects. The JUI-Samiul Haq, based on a madrasah that trained mujahideen in Akora Khatak from the 1980s on, has stagnated. Its leader emerged on top of the Defense of Pakistan Council in 2011, an alliance of Islamic parties including extremist and banned militant outfits. Only JI and JUI-F remained mainstream Islamic parties.
JI
The current politics of the two Islamic parties JI and JUI reflects two different Islamic cultures. The JI represents Islamic ideology, national and international networking, vigilante culture, and anti-Indian, anti-American, and anti-Zionist political attitudes. The JUI represents tribal Islam of the Pakhtun variety, a mosque-and-madrasah network, and a sectarian identity based on the Deobandi school of thought. The JI supported Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1996 and interpreted the Taliban’s ascendency as a U.S. conspiracy. Later, the JI appropriated the Taliban’s cause. When a JI rally in Peshawar was attacked by the Taliban in 2010, its leadership accused the U.S. intelligence agency Blackwater for it, since Blackwater was made up of CIA contractors. After video showing the Taliban publicly lashing a 17-year-old girl from Swat was released in 2009, the JI claimed that the story and the video were fake and fabricated. The JI has a study circle mind-set. Its 6,213 registered members undergo periodic training workshops for ideological indoctrination that leads to self-righteousness, missionary zeal, and a commitment to changing morals and manners, politics and economics, and the region and the world.40 It has an all-embracing agenda pertaining to personal piety, interest-free banking, Islamic education through textbooks, and passing and safeguarding Islamic laws, such as the Hudood Ordinances and the Blasphemy Law. Its indoctrinated workers disapprove of New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, and birthday parties as Western imposition, Basant as a Hindu festival,41 and Nouroze as a Zoroastrian practice—all un-Islamic.42 It has resorted to intimidation tactics to stop the showing of Burqavaganza, a play critical of the use of the hijab and veil staged by the Ajoka theater in Lahore, on the basis that the play ridicules Islamic mores. The party has launched several anti-America rallies. It has been in step with such groups as Hizbut-Tahrir, which operates mainly among expatriate Muslims in the West to establish Khilafat. The JI has popularized a dichotomy between Islam and the West and condemned the ruling elite as stooges of American imperialism. Amir Munawwar Hasan (2011) represented the first generation of leadership from the JI’s student wing, Islami Jamiat Talaba, and was followed by a veteran of MMA activist politics, Sirajul Haq, in 2014.
The JI is a vanguard party of virtuosos committed to heralding the movement toward an Islamic revolution from the top, presuming that it would have a trickle-down effect. That explains its failure to connect with the people and mobilize them along the mundane issues of daily life. The JI has been criticized for spreading bigotry, anti-Westernism, hatred against non-Muslim minorities, and support for the Taliban. It has several subsidiary organizations, such as the Islamic Lawyers Movement. While its youth organizations, Pasban and Shabaab Milli, are no longer active, the party has operated more through schools, colleges, and universities than through madrasahs and thus influenced a large number of students who got subsequently recruited into official and professional positions.43 The party has failed at the polls but succeeded in spreading its message that religion and politics are one in Islam, that Islam is a complete code of life, that the Christian West has been inherently inimical to the Islamic world since the Crusades, and that America is committed to destroying Pakistan. It has upheld the cause of safeguarding national sovereignty in terms of security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets against the perceived Indo-Israeli conspiracy to destroy them, endorsed by the United States. It considered the MQM a terrorist organization and threatened to stage a long march to Islamabad for establishing peace in Karachi. The JI lost its Mohajir constituency in Sindh, its partners in the MMA, its relatively populist and articulate leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed, and some electoral ground in its stronghold in KP in 2008 and 2013—even though it could form a coalition government with PTI in this state after the 2013 elections.
The JUI-Fazl ur Rehman has been a strident Deobandi sectarian party close to the Taliban in terms of ideological moorings and organizational links. Under Musharraf, it was the mainstay of the MMA government in Peshawar and a coalition partner of the PML-Q in Baluchistan. Its chief, Fazl ur Rehman, was appointed leader of the opposition in the National Assembly by Musharraf in 2003, even though he was not supported by the majority of the opposition. The JUI focused on keeping a high public profile. It got its clerics and party stalwarts appointed on key positions in the PPP-led ruling setup after 2008. Whereas the JI has never been a coalition partner of “secular” parties such as the PPP or ANP, the JUI has partnered with both of them. In 2009–2010, it continued to give an impression of leaving the PPP-led government in protest against its pro-U.S. policies, ostensibly to placate its constituency among the Taliban.44 It also wanted to include Ahle-Sunnatwal-Jamat, the political wing of the banned militant anti-Shia party Sipahe-Sahaba Pakistan in the “revived” MMA. The JUI mediated between the Taliban and the government for signing peace deals in the FATA in 2009. The JUI’s oppositional politics within the government related to, for example, the budgetary cuts for the ministries under its control and criticism of the budget for following the instructions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.45 It continued to talk about unfulfilled promises such as changing policy vis-à-vis the United States. The JUI left the coalition in protest against the sacking of its minister Azam Swati, the main financier of the party who had a huge business concern in the United States and who later joined the PTI. Fazl ur Rehman fielded himself as a candidate for prime minister in June 2012 even as his party had only eight members in the Assembly. In the 2013 elections, it emerged as the second largest party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly as the leading opponent of the PTI.
At the other end, the Baluch nationalist parties were reduced to small groups of people belonging to their respective tribes. The (Baluch) National Party (NP) and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP) dominated the political scene in Baluchistan in 2014. The NP upholds the Baluch nationalist cause through democratic means under its new leader, Chief Minister Abdul Malik Baloch. The PKMAP is a major coalition partner of the NP and the PML-N in Quetta and Islamabad. The NP and PKMAP demonstrate a liberal and progressive perspective on issues of de-conflation between religion and politics, devolution of power to federating units, and adoption of democratic means to achieve political goals. Baluch nationalism remained without an authentic and inclusive representation in the political system. The Jamhoori Watan Party and Baluch National Party (BNP), based on Bugti and Mengal tribes, respectively, remained relatively less visible outfits.
THE 2013 ELECTIONS
The 2013 elections displayed an enhanced level of political participation with a voter turnout of 55 percent as compared with 44 percent in 2008, an upgraded list of registered voters (thanks to the work of the election commission, which eliminated many bogus voters), and a clear mandate.46 The military establishment generally played a role in election campaigns either up front, as in 1964–1965, 1985, and 2002, or as a backstage player, as in 1970, 1988, 1990, and 2008. This role was selectively characterized by manipulation of selection of party candidates, creation of party factions, deployment of partisan election officers, control over the media coverage of political parties, and even outright changes of election results.47 In 2013, the army projected its “neutral” profile. An “independent” Election Commission and a “neutral” caretaker government were put in place on the basis of understanding between the treasury and opposition benches in the National Assembly. However, political parties faced a new menace from outside the parliamentary system in the form of the Taliban. This group threatened and later attacked the three “liberal” and “secular” parties—the PPP, ANP, and MQM—and virtually drove them out of the field in terms of reaching out to their voters. Nearly 300 persons were killed and 900 injured in 148 attacks from January to May 2013.48 The PPP was also rendered “leaderless” as the Lahore High Court barred President Zardari from participating in politics. The party leadership took the threat seriously after Benazir’s assassination in 2007. The ANP’s leader, Asfandyar Wali Khan, was unable to address a single public meeting. Hundreds of his party members had already been killed by the Taliban. The Taliban “sanctioned” only the PMLN, PTI, JI, and JUI-F to run election campaigns. This meant that only Punjab, where the PML-N and PTI campaigned, had a real election, while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh lacked party activity out in the open. Baluchistan was the target of both the proto-Taliban groups and the militant section of the Baluch nationalists.
A lot of rhetoric about change in the system came from the PTI and others without a clear set of policies or an attractive ideological framework. The election soon emerged as a battle of titans who claimed they could deliver the nation from misery. Anti-Americanism, an anti-corruption agenda, and support for negotiations with the Taliban in search of peace moved to the center stage of the election discourse. Politics took a turn to the right, as the liberal parties succumbed to the Taliban attacks as well as to the anti-incumbency factor in both Islamabad and Peshawar.49 Under these circumstances, the media emerged as a new arena for political contest by way of providing a forum for public debate among contestants and as a medium for the paid party advertisement.
The election results brought several surprises. Instead of a hung Parliament as predicted by analysts, there was a clear lead for the PML-N, which formed the government in Islamabad and Lahore. The extent of the collapse of the ANP in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the PPP in Punjab was beyond all expectations. The PTI’s rise was phenomenal, as it bagged thirty-one seats in the National Assembly and formed a coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The party ate into the vote banks of the MQM, PPP, and ANP, where Imran Khan emerged as the viable alternative for disgruntled activists and voters, especially from the urban middle class. However, this pattern of voting did not change the political landscape of Punjab, where Nawaz Sharif continued to have a stable support base after winning back electoral heavyweights from the PML-Q that collapsed during the campaign. At the other end, Islamic parties nosedived in the election, with the sole exception of the JUI-F, partly because the Islamic agenda was hijacked by the Taliban operating militantly from outside the system. Still, the JI joined the ruling coalition in Peshawar, and the JUI-F did so in Islamabad. This kept both of them visible on top.
Finally, the election results led to regionalization of politics whereby political parties clung to their core areas of support in an election marred by uncertainty, not the least due to militancy.50 This applied to the PML-N in Punjab, the PPP and MQM in rural and urban Sindh, respectively, the JUI-F in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and a plethora of miniscule tribal-based parties in Baluchistan. Only the PTI covered new ground partly as a result of its accommodation by the Taliban and possibly the tacit support of the “establishment,” as alleged by many analysts. Overall, the 2013 elections testified to the primacy of political parties as leading actors on the political stage of Pakistan, along with their leaders as icons for party identification. The period between the 2013 and the next elections was expected to stabilize the emergent pattern of party politics at a new pedestal characterized by the emergence of a new party PTI in the Parliament, reincorporation of Islamic parties back in the mainstream, and possible revival of “liberal” parties, such as the PPP and ANP. However, within a year, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif faced the greatest challenge to his government as the PTI launched its sit-in in Islamabad on August 14, 2014, as a protest against the alleged rigging in the 2013 elections. A minor religio-political group, Minhajul Quran, led by cleric Tahirul Qadri, joined hands with Imran Khan. Together they were able to shake the democratic dispensation. However, all the parliamentary parties got together in the face of the grim prospect of a military takeover, especially after a PTI renegade, Javed Hashmi, “revealed” the links of the two mavericks with the establishment.
CONCLUSION
This chapter sought to analyze internal cleavages, organizational problems, and personal and ideological conflicts within political parties and their modes of expression and mobilization. Some broad features of political parties in the country have been visible. For example, they are leader parties par excellence. Nawaz Sharif, Asif Zardari, Imran Khan, Altaf Hussain, Asfandyar Wali Khan, and Fazl ur Rehman are inseparable from their respective parties. As icons, they appeal to the party’s followers in the public and symbolize a one-window operation in the context of negotiations and bargaining with other players on the political stage. The key to the dynastic leadership lay with the followers’ need for party identification. Zardari’s leadership provided the grand symbol of identification with a political party in the absence of an elaborate hierarchical structure, an ideology, a set of policies, and a clear class-based constituency. The ability of Zardari to keep the leading factions of the PPP united and to crystallize an appropriate projection of the PPP legacy played a crucial role in keeping the party as a serious contender of power in the field. At the other end, Nawaz Sharif is responsible for reinventing the Muslim League for the past quarter of a century, in the process establishing a pattern of patrimonial leadership that survived his absence from the political scene for eight long years. The 2008 and 2013 elections show that the PML-N’s appeal is now confined to Punjab. Inaction for a decade when Nawaz Sharif was in exile cost the party in terms of organizational work. Asfandyar Wali Khan represents Ghaffar Khan’s charisma, which has diluted over a span of three generations. However, it is still morally appealing in the framework of Pakhtun nationalism. Fazl ur Rehman is a legatee more of the Deobandi network of mosques and madrasahs than of intrafamily transition of leadership. Imran Khan represents an option for middle-class citizens of Pakistan as a messiah. Outside KP, he lacks a rural constituency that has been the backbone of the electorate in terms of voter turnout. The PTI’s core moved from a team of ideologues and reformers to electoral contestants prior to the 2013 elections. In the JI’s case, the new leadership elected in 2014 is bland and uninspiring and carries few prospects of a credible showing at the polls. At the other end, Altaf Hussain’s remote-control leadership draws on fossilized positions, couched in a rhetoric projecting the party’s middle-and lower-middle-class demands and aspirations.
One can argue that the leader rather than a set of policies provides the framework for resilience of public support for political parties. While the liberal intelligentsia and civil society in general and the PTI in particular sharply criticize what they consider a cult of leader, the family-based leadership represents continuity in terms of a broad spectrum of policies and ideologies. Political parties have kept the modicum of democracy in place in Pakistan as a source of legitimacy through the Parliament. They structure the political conflict by rationalizing the message of contending forces and providing a sense of order to a fluid situation. They keep the public in the picture during the period between elections. They have mobilized the public on all issues through all means for almost all the time during the post-Musharraf period. The demand for change in the system has yet to acquire a transformative character, in the absence of a class-based idiom and a realistic set of policies. At least partly due to the strident role of the electronic media, people now identify political parties with corruption, dynastic politics, bad governance, and pursuit of the foreign agenda, such as war against terror. At the same time, political parties in Pakistan are the makers and shapers of a massive—though amorphous—system of institutional representation of electoral contestants who have scant economic and political resources to get things done for their constituents on their own. This fact promises to keep parties at the heart of the political system of Pakistan almost as a structural requirement.
NOTES