Why military crackdown couldn't hold back Imran Khan

Early Wednesday morning, protesters belonging to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) were forced to retreat from Islamabad after several days of clashes with military and paramilitary authorities. While verified figures are still awaited, several eyewitness accounts report live ammunition being fired late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, killing at least eight people. These events mark the fourth major confrontation between government authorities and the PTI in the last six months, centering on the issue of the continued incarceration of ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan and the continuing crackdown on his party across the country.

The rights violations and heavy coercion against the PTI characterize a continuing phase of political instability, dating back at least to April 2022, following a breakdown in relations between the military and Khan, and the ouster of the latter from the government and finally his arrest.

Since then, the military's dominance over executive affairs has only grown thanks to another civilian face – a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz-led government, with Shehbaz Sharif as prime minister – installed at the following a seriously compromised general election in February this year. Earlier this month, the ruling regime further strengthened its grip on state affairs through a constitutional amendment that transferred control of judicial appointments and selection of judges to the executive.

With the PTI violently forced off the streets of Islamabad, Khan still under arrest and the constitutional amendment still in force, the ruling regime appears to have won the final round.

The immediate post-mortem of the aborted demonstration reveals three problems. The first was a miscalculation of the extent to which the government would use violent means to disperse the protesters once they entered Islamabad. Excessive, life-threatening violence is periodically used in the so-called peripheries of the tribal districts of Pakistan and Balochistan, but it is rarely deployed as a method of crowd control in the heartland, let alone the federal capital . The unexpected escalation of state violence, under the pretext of ensuring the safety of the visiting Belarusian president, and the panic that followed brought a bloody end to the sit-in.

The second was the indecision of the leaders. The protests were simultaneously led by Ali Amin Gandapur, chief minister of the PTI-led Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, and Bushra Bibi, the former prime minister's incarcerated wife. At different times, the convoys appeared to be moving at different speeds, and internal accounts now point to internal disagreements within leaders and between leaders and protesters over the final destination. These were perhaps best captured in a short video clip where PTI protesters can be seen urging a visibly exhausted Gandapur to stay the course and pick up speed.

Third, most of the mobilization arrived south of the capital from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa relatively freely, in the hope that reinforcements from northward Punjab would arrive. That part never came to fruition. Preventive measures taken by the government to arrest party activists and lock down entry and exit points of all major urban centers, such as Lahore, have severely limited mobility across the province. Punjab's provincial leaders also seemed less enthusiastic about the prospect of a prolonged sit-in.

While the government considers this a victory and the PTI reflects on its internal turmoil, the underlying factors causing episodic instability in the political sphere remain in place. An enforced calm in Islamabad simply cannot mask the fact that the current system of government is plagued by a lack of popular legitimacy. The February elections, which gave birth to the current parliament and resulted in a PMLN-led central government, were compromised by the denial of voting rights to PTI voters, the incarceration of its candidates and the manipulation of election results. ballot.

The polls took place in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis in Pakistan's recent history, with inflation rates well above 20 percent and an economy on the brink of default. Even though macroeconomic indicators have stabilized in recent months, the massive erosion of real wages and living standards since the end of 2021 remains fresh in people's minds.

The government's proclamation of economic stability relies on a current account surplus and growing dollar reserves do little to quell the violence inflicted on ordinary households with an average growth rate of less than 2 percent over the past three years. However, viewing the current wave of popular discontent as merely a spasmodic response to economic distress would do the analysis a disservice. No amount of violent restrictions or internal disarray can negate the entrenched ideological popularity of Imran Khan and his party.

Over the past decade, the PTI has risen head and shoulders above all other parties to cultivate an information ecosystem of unprecedented reach and penetration across the country. It draws on Islamic-influenced images and narratives, Khan's personal appeal as a political (and even spiritual) leader, and a consistent depiction of politics as an existential struggle against a corrupt cabal ( which, since 2022, also includes the military high command). All of this was delivered via viral TikToks, WhatsApp forwards, and Facebook videos to vast swaths of a population entirely immersed in the digital realm.

In other words, the party offers a cultural script that makes sense of economic and political disarray far better than any of its rivals. Reminiscent of domestic politics around the world, Pakistan's traditional parties, like the PMLN and PPP, are struggling to expand their support base in the face of a populist rise, taking refuge instead in dynastic control and the sclerotic distribution of patronage to individual voters. key, such as the delegitimized mainstream. media. This strategy offers, at best, rapidly diminishing returns.

But perhaps more importantly, Pakistan's military high command is in the grip of a crisis of public appeal due to its turn against Khan in 2022. Its conventional support base, among Punjab's urban middle class, now firmly leads the PTI opposition charge, leaving limited access. towards alternative sources of legitimacy. In this configuration, stability in the political sphere can only be ensured through coercion. And it looks like this will remain the dominant agenda 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), Lahore, Pakistan.

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