For years, I was often left scratching my head after engaging with supporters of Imran Khan. It seemed that they were functioning in some alternative reality — especially after the May 9, 2023, riots. What’s even more baffling is the fact that after the riot, one began to see many folks who were thought to be ‘wiser,’ suddenly take leave of their wisdom and enthusiastically enter the reality where much of the pro-Khan crowd was stationed.
A year or so ago, there were only a handful of commentators and journalists who more-than-alluded that when Imran Khan’s supporters and members of his party burst out in May 2023 to attack military installations and buildings, they were part of a plot to instigate a mutiny within the military against the incumbent army chief, General Syed Asim Munir.
Now that evidence is increasingly falling in line with what was once an uncomfortable assumption, one can ask why so many journalists, television anchors, lawyers, judges and former military men chose to slide into this alternative reality? As the court-martial proceedings against the former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Chief Lt-Gen Faiz Hameed are beginning to gather steam, a lot will emerge which will be enough to substantiate that, indeed, a parallel reality did exist in the country’s contemporary political discourses.
In this parallel reality, shaped by Faiz and his ‘network’, there were severe divisions in the armed forces, and much of the rank and file was pro-Khan, who just needed a strategic push to overwhelm whatever ‘little support’ Gen Munir had in the military.
Any rational analysis of the May 9 riots and of the way Khan was launching verbal assaults against the military establishment (ME) and its chief, would have led one to conclude that Imran Khan and his party will never be allowed to get away with this — not unless the ME was okay to tolerate similar attacks in the future as well. No complex formula or rocket science was required to reach this conclusion, just some basic deductive thinking.
Yet, I was perplexed when I saw so many ‘wise’ lawyers, judges and journalists join the already mesmerised crowd in Faiz’s parallel reality. Even after the May 9 violence failed to trigger what it set out to achieve, they chose to believe Faiz’s projection that it was just a matter of time that the cocktail of Imran Khan’s ‘massive support,’ and economic turmoil would eventually see the former released from jail and jump back into the prime minister’s hot seat. It was a wonderful fantasy peddled as a prediction by a former spymaster who was able to flex power even after his forced retirement and before his arrest.
There were three kinds of people who populated this fantasy.
1. Imran Khan’s supporters, many of whom have been bouncing back and forth between multiple fantasies fed to them by the previous ME leaderships since at least 2011. From 2017, most of the fantasies were evolved by the so-called ‘Faiz network.’ These supporters have only a scant idea about how politics actually functions. It is entirely amoral. But for them, politics never goes beyond emotional outbursts, sloganeering or fiery monologues that they come across through vlogs and social media sites.
2. The second type of people residing in the fantasy were/are journalists, lawyers and judges who, due to a misstep or two, plunged into Faiz’s parallel reality. They decided to invest their support in a side that sounded confident of a victory and could benefit them as well. Some of these folk claimed they are doing this to ‘safeguard democracy,’ ‘judicial independence,’ and other noble tick-in-the-box stuff. However, at least some among these are finally realising that they have been taken for a ride. Most of these folks are good in their respective areas of expertise but terrible in their understanding of realpolitik. They are also a highly impressionable lot.
3. The third type consists of people who probably knew that Faiz was cooking up a fantasy to keep Imran Khan’s support intact, especially after his ouster, but they went along. Eventually, they ended up believing in their own fibs.
When populists such as Imran Khan in Pakistan and Narendra Modi in India began making deeper inroads in the politics of their respective countries, it was understood by various political economists that their rise was being largely facilitated by Pakistani and Indian middle classes
While it is easy to detect types 1 and 3, it is type 2 which surprised me the most. It was as if, for years, they had withheld their urge to support Imran Khan before suddenly jumping to his side during the May 9 riots, and especially after the February 8, 2024, elections. My thesis in this regard —which I have discussed in some detail in my 2023 book Imran Khan: Myth of the Pakistani Middle-Classes — is that this is largely a case of class solidarity. Let me explain.
According to the 19th-century German political theorist Karl Marx, exchanges between different classes create differing interests. Therefore, classes unite with their own to protect their respective economic and political interests. Marx wrote that the creation of classes leads to ‘class conflict.’
But there can also be conflict within a class, which can hamper class solidarity. This is most common amongst the Asian middle-classes. When populists such as Imran Khan in Pakistan and Narendra Modi in India began making deeper inroads in the politics of their respective countries, it was understood by various political economists that their rise was being largely facilitated by Pakistani and Indian middle classes. This is not incorrect as such.
Imran Khan’s middle-class supporters in Pakistan were mostly located in central and northern Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In Punjab, though, tensions had been developing within this class. There was a clash between differing political and economic interests in this class. This intra-class clash in Punjab was manifested by the animosity between Imran Khan’s PTI and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N).
In the 1970s, American sociologist, Erik Olin Wright posited that Marxian class theories needed to be evolved because within middle-class groups are large segments that are neither bourgeois (capitalists having the means of production) nor the proletariat (the working classes).
Wright called this ‘contradictory class location.’ By this he meant that between the capitalists and the proletariat was not really a homogenous middle-class, but segments within this class with contradicting characteristics adopted from the classes above and below them. However, Wright was of the view that such groups are likely to support the political choices of the classes that control the means of production.
Therefore, in Punjab, one part of the middle class supported the PML-N (headed by an influential business family), and the other supported the PTI, a party that, rather visibly, was being financed by multi-millionaires. But there are also occasions when the old Marxian notion of ‘class solidarity’ kicks in within the middle-class, despite the presence of intra-class tensions.
Middle-class men and women who opposed the PTI politically, started to sympathise with this party’s ‘besieged’ top and core leadership. There was clearly an overarching sense of class compatibility at work here. This aided the PTI in attracting sympathy from a wider circle of middle-and-upper-income groups
On May 9 last year, images of men and women destroying public and state property in Pakistan began to flood the electronic and social media. The rioters were PTI supporters and members. These images seemed to excite a lot of middle-class men and women. Many of them were not necessarily PTI fans. In fact, a lot of them had been critical of Imran Khan’s fallen regime.
Yet, they couldn’t help but applaud (on social media) this supposed ‘middle-class uprising.’ What they saw were people who dressed like them, spoke like them, and could have belonged to their own social circles. In 2022, though, when hundreds of working-class men from Punjab belonging to an Islamist party had gone on a rampage in Lahore, those who were applauding the May 9 ‘uprising’ were not impressed at all. Their criticism of that particular violence was scathing, whereas the violence committed by members of their own social class on May 9 last year triggered sympathy and even admiration in them for the rioters. Additionally, thousands of mostly poor women were rotting in Pakistani jails for years. Yet, it was only after some middle-and-upper-class women belonging to the PTI were put in jail that many members of the middle class became sensitive about the ‘plight of women prisoners.’
Quite a few middle-class men and women who opposed the PTI politically, started to sympathise with this party’s ‘besieged’ top and core leadership. There was clearly an overarching sense of class compatibility at work here. This aided the PTI in attracting sympathy from a wider circle of middle-and-upper-income groups. This trend and knee-jerk impulse began to die down, though. But then it erupted again soon after the February 2024 elections.
A wave of euphoria and excitement swept the mentioned classes. This, however, once again eroded any semblance and ability left in the ‘wiser’ folk in understanding the amoral and Machiavellian nature of politics as they lurched ahead to celebrate yet another ‘middle-class victory.’ They were now even willing to rip apart the Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faiz Isa, because he did now allow himself to be swept up by the excitement and an imaginary middle-class ‘revolution.’
The excitement also aided the ‘Faiz network’ in strengthening the fantasy of Imran Khan’s ‘inevitable’ return to power. But this enthusiasm failed to notice that the ‘fielding’ set by Faiz was being systematically dismantled and replaced by a ‘reset’ whose purpose is to keep a rampaging Imran Khan out of politics due to the blunders that his regime committed in the fields of economics and foreign policy and, more so, after the manner in which he tried to grab the attention of the ME by actually demonising it.
This was a rather curious tactic, probably born from an increasing sense of frustration and feeling of anger and isolation. Things have come to a point that some respected political commentators such as Najam Sethi fear that Imran Khan is now hoping that a clash between his supporters and the police would produce some ‘dead bodies’ which may finally make the military agree to talk to him. If so, then this suggests that Imran Khan is still operating in an alternative reality. He’s become a prisoner of his own ego and delusions.