The 2024 Election saw a new generation of voting Pakistanis graduate from virtual to real politics, and they are demanding the mandate owed to them. There is pressure on all state institutions for accountability – especially, the military and judiciary - and increasingly, it’s coming from within. Now what?
General Zia’s children – the Gen Xs of the 80s - were subjects of asceticism, gender apartheid, ethnic and neoliberal inequalities and their class consciousness was defeated by religious supremacy.
General Musharraf’s post 9/11 generation of Millennials rejected ‘binaries,’ but were hot contradictions in themselves – they benefitted from an authoritarian ‘enlightened moderation,’ while romancing with Muslim exceptionalism, agency, and commodification.
Imran Khan’s Gen Zs are drinking the populism-flavored ‘anti-establishment’ Kool Aid while retaining hatred for landed electables and a high tolerance for religious politics. They share an anger with a global youth that resents economic elites, but supports disruptive leaders - which explains Bushra’s and Imran Khan’s underachieving, virtue-signalling, ideologically hybrid coda in the generational schema.
Most of all, the elite capture by older generations of politicians, governors, advisors and former bureaucrats, judges, servicemen and development practitioners and activists, who thrive on extensions and cut-paste projects, is widening the generational disconnect, suffocating meritocracy, and denying access to the marginalized.
The Lawyers’ Movement of 2007 was the last of the 20th century style protests. A decade later, many first-time voters elected the pro-establishment boomer, Imran Khan, who repaid this debt by pardoning the Mir Jaffar - Musharraf, constitutionally enabling Bajwa’s extension and, indulging Saqib Nisar’s dam-populism.
A S.W.O.T. assessment confirms that Khan’s strength was empty rhetoric and a social media governance marked by weak economic missteps and bureaucratic messes inspired by magical realism. His divisive political performance missed opportunities to promote rights because of his conservatism, victim-blaming and the embedding of religion into school curricula. The threats to freedoms of expression, media, and right to dissent were cloaked by performances of piety, preaching and pomposity.
Even though it was clear that the PTI is of Khan, by Khan and for Khan, in 2024, he rebranded himself – now, as a haqiqi anti-establishment victim of judicial revenge and imperialist regime change.
In global legal opinion, Pakistan’s Constitution is considered exemplary, yet its commission, mainly by military rulers and judicial abettors, has turned it into a negative constitution.
Defying even the PTI’s own expectations, Khan won the hearts, minds and votes of the electorate. Neophyte women supporters braved jail for him; they took on the veil to secretly canvas for him, and even recolonized their womanhood in a Fanonian gesture of donning the Imran face mask as an act of patriarchal fidelity. Worldly intellectuals and lawyers sacralized Khan’s persona by pledging their allegiance to him on the holy book rather than the party manifesto.
Yet, too many older liberal democrats continue to invest in the crumbling old order and justify the derailing of an inconvenient electoral result. In the past year, they should have extended more legal and moral support to all PTI women activists and protested more stridently against pre-electoral bans and censorship. They must now compel the ruling dispensation to detox Pakistani democracy from its addiction to the establishment.
In global legal opinion, Pakistan’s Constitution is considered exemplary, yet its commission, mainly by military rulers and judicial abettors, has turned it into a negative constitution.
In the immediate instance, it is imperative to ratify statutory restrictions on the role of the military and judiciary and limit the professional mandate of office holders and purge their economic privileges.
Given the outrage over the Bushra and Imran Khan iddat case, there must be a concerted move to erase all gender inequalities in marriage and inheritance laws, recognizing that these allow men to weaponize these as tools of revenge, extraction, and impoverishment of women.
Thirdly, a negative constitution that discriminates against minorities inspires majoritarian mobs to commit murders under any pretext of Muslim injury. This impunity must end.
The current debate on fiduciary powers and responsibilities of provincial and local governments is critically important. Rather than blanket defense or rejection, the 18th Amendment and NFC require deeper economic scrutiny without infantilizing provincial governments or reducing their administrative sovereignty. A healthy competition between provinces over financial, economic, gender and human rights’ performances can only deepen democracy.
Democracy may require fair and free elections, but only local governments can guarantee meaningful delivery of services and the production of genuine representatives who can strengthen and sustain peoples’ power.
The Council of Common Interests needs to be a functional, regular and intellectual clearing house for settling Federal-Provincial relations and agreements - similar to the way the government does with foreign entities. It must include the voice of citizens. Private sector expertise should be tapped by provincial departments and rigorous regulatory mechanisms ensured.
Democracy may require fair and free elections, but only local governments can guarantee meaningful delivery of services and the production of genuine representatives who can strengthen and sustain peoples’ power.
Most of all, the elite capture by older generations of politicians, governors, advisors and former bureaucrats, judges, servicemen and development practitioners and activists, who thrive on extensions and cut-paste projects, is widening the generational disconnect, suffocating meritocracy, and denying access to the marginalized.
All elites need to concede their privileges, temper their ambitions, and stay in their constitutional lanes, in order to democratize a restive Pakistan.