Early on Wednesday morning, protestors belonging to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) were beaten into retreat from Islamabad after several days of clashes with military and paramilitary authorities. While verified figures are still awaited, several eye-witness accounts report the use of live ammunition late on Tuesday night,-early Wednesday morning, resulting in at least eight deaths. These events mark the fourth major confrontation between government authorities and the PTI in the last six months, centred on the issue of ex-PM Imran Khan’s continued incarceration and ongoing crackdowns against his party across the country.
Rights violations and heavy coercion against the PTI characterise an ongoing phase of political instability, which can be traced back to at least April 2022, following a breakdown of relations between the military and Khan, and the latter’s ouster from government and eventual arrest.
Since then, the military’s domination of executive affairs has only grown via another civilian face — a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz led government featuring Shehbaz Sharif as PM — put in place through a heavily compromised general election in February this year. Earlier this month, the ruling regime further tightened its hold on state affairs through a constitutional amendment that transferred control of judicial appointments and bench selection to the executive.
With PTI having been violently coerced off the streets of Islamabad, Khan still under arrest, and the constitutional amendment still in place, the ruling regime appears to have won the latest round.
Immediate post-mortem of the aborted protest reveals three issues. The first was a miscalculation of the extent to which the government would use violent means to disperse protestors once they had entered Islamabad. Excessive, life-endangering violence, sees periodic use in Pakistan’s so-called peripheries of the tribal districts and Balochistan, but is rarely deployed as a crowd-control method in the heartland, let alone the federal capital. The unexpected escalation in state violence, on the pretext of the security of visiting Belarusian President, and the ensuing panic brought the sit-in to a bloody end.
The second was leadership indecision. The protests were simultaneously led by Ali Amin Gandapur, chief minister of the PTI-ruled Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, and Bushra Bibi, the incarcerated ex-PM’s wife. At various points, the convoys appeared to be moving at different speeds, and insider accounts now report there were internal disagreements within the leadership and between the leaders and protestors on the final destination. These were perhaps best captured in a short video clip where PTI protestors can be seen urging a visibly frazzled Gandapur to stay the course and pick up speed.
Third, the bulk of the mobilisation came south to the capital from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa relatively unencumbered, with the expectation that reinforcements traveling north from Punjab would arrive. That part never materialised. Pre-emptive measures taken by the government to arrest party activists and lock down entry and exit points of all major urban centers, such as Lahore, severely constrained mobility across the province. The provincial leadership in Punjab, too, seemed less enthused by the prospect of a prolonged sit-in.
While the government chalks this down as a victory, and the PTI reflects on its internal troubles, the underlying factors driving episodic instability in the political sphere remain in place. A coerced calm in Islamabad simply cannot paper over the fact that the current ruling arrangement is plagued by an absence of popular legitimacy. February’s election, which birthed the current parliament and resulted in a PMLN-led central government, was compromised by the denial of franchise to PTI voters, the incarceration of its candidates, and the manipulation of polling-day outcomes.
These polls happened in the midst of Pakistan’s worst cost-of-living crisis in recent history, with inflation rates well above 20 per cent, and the economy teetering on the brink of default. While macroeconomic indicators have stabilised in recent months, the wholesale erosion of real wages and living standards since late 2021 remains fresh in people’s memory.
The government’s proclamation of economic stability rests on a current account surplus and growing dollar reserves does little to assuage the violence inflicted on common households by an average growth rate of less than 2 per cent over these past three years. However, seeing the current wave of popular discontentment as a mere spasmodic response to economic distress would be doing an analytical disservice. No amount of violent curtailment or internal disarray can deny the entrenched ideational popularity of Imran Khan and his party.
In the past decade, the PTI has risen head and shoulders above all other parties to cultivate an informational ecosystem with unprecedented reach and penetration across the country. It draws on Islam-inflected imagery and narrations, Khan’s personal appeal as a political (and even spiritual) leader, and a consistent portrayal of politics as an existential fight against a corrupt cabal (that since 2022 also features the military high command). All of it disseminated through viral TikToks, WhatsApp forwards, and Facebook videos to vast swathes of a population fully immersed in the digital realm.
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In other words, the party provides a cultural script that makes sense of economic and political disarray far better than any of its rivals. Reminiscent of domestic politics the world over, Pakistan’s traditional parties, like the PMLN and PPP, are struggling to expand their support base against a populist upsurge, taking refuge instead in dynastic control and sclerotic distribution of patronage to key constituents, such as a delegitimised mainstream media. This strategy offers rapidly diminishing returns, at best.
But perhaps most crucially, Pakistan’s military high command is in the throes of a crisis of public appeal due to its turn against Khan in 2022. Its conventional core support base among the urban middle class of Punjab now firmly leads PTI’s oppositional charge, leaving scant access to alternative sources of legitimacy. In this configuration, stability in the political sphere can only be enforced through coercion. And it seems that will remain the dominant order of the day in the months to come.
The writer teaches politics and sociology at the Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), in Lahore, Pakistan
