It is nearly two years since a vote of no confidence ousted then Prime Minister Imran Khan in Pakistan. Yet, his Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI) party (lit., ‘Pakistan Movement for Justice’) continues to command widespread public support, and the incarcerated cricketer-turned-politician remains the country’s most popular leader.
There is considerable debate on the PTI’s ‘anti-status quo’ vote bank. The party challenges the powerful military and mainstream parties through largely non-violent action. However, equating this constituency with extreme populism in mature democracies is misleading. It conflates the importance of familiar avenues of service delivery — democratic or dictatorial — even as there is a national consensus on political reforms.
Khan’s populism, in my view, is a product of local political culture, not violent extremism. In this post, I will demonstrate that seeking clarity requires stakeholders to look beyond their personal position on the political spectrum, thinking beyond outdated Cold War-era tropes, and acknowledging that the liberalisation of media has impacted identity-based citizen mobilisations in ways we do not as yet fully understand. As such, an understanding of communication strategies is necessary for a deeper interrogation.
From Populism to Extremism
Globally, populism has evoked hyper-conservative leaders like Donald Trump (USA), Narendra Modi (India), Boris Johnson (UK), and Marine Le Pen (France). Their views towards immigrants and/or marginalised communities are consistently scrutinised in the press. Some communication scholars, however, caution against attributing neat political programs to populist leaders, viewing it instead as a political style marked by recurring themes: an idealised nation, a virtuous people, and opposition to a corrupt élite.
Alvares and Dahlgren point out that populism is episodic, emerging in moments of crisis, claiming to be revolutionary but leaning towards ‘reforms’, often with limited efficacy. It is hostile to representative politics but lives symbiotically with it. Populism arises from a tension within democracy between the concept of a sovereign ‘the people’ and liberal constitutionalism, the latter focusing on complex institutions and laws limiting the direct influence of ‘the people’ to protect individual freedoms. It often disregards the need for constitutional limits on direct democracy while constitutionalists struggle to include inputs from citizens effectively, leading to marginalisation. As traditional political institutions cluster around the Centre, many feel frustrated and abandoned, and populism is one increasingly frequent outcome.
While the debate on populism continues, Western observers are most concerned about populist tendencies towards extremism and violence. This, even when Podemos, a newly formed Spanish ‘progressive’ party that emerged from anti-austerity demonstrations of 2011–12, is recognised for populist styles and active use of social media to engage citizens.
Commentary on Khan’s popularity often reflects concerns of extremism without adequate interrogation of local dynamics. To understand this, it is useful to disentangle Khan’s populist rhetoric from Pakistan’s political culture.
Outcome of Political Culture or Violent Extremism?
To understand Khan’s popularity, we need to examine political messaging in Pakistan, where a leader’s rhetoric is usually based on a zero-sum competition with their opponents, boiling down to some version of ‘support us to save Pakistan’.
Having studied political rhetoric in the local press between 1992–2014, I found that no political actor can claim to be free of contentious claims. The then Chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Benazir Bhutto frequently criticised her rival Nawaz Sharif (of Pakistan Muslim League N, PML(N)) through tropes of corruption, incompetence, lack of popular will, and Sindh’s sacrifice for Pakistan. Sharif, at the time a protégé of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, projected the image of a Punjabi strongman, a considerate modern Muslim, capable of executing glamorous infrastructure and consumer projects, explains Iftikhar Dadi in a study of political posters of that time. Notably, Sharif was tasked by the military with mobilisations against Bhutto of the kind PTI is known to do nowadays.
So, if Imran Khan’s politics appears contentious and extreme to some, it may be an outcome of deeply entrenched populist styles instead of a coherent ideological program, a populism required of any political actor with national aspirations in Pakistan. This makes sense if we assume that like all mainstream parties and military regimes, PTI lacks substance.
But my point is not to equate PTI’s politics with its rivals. It is a call for a dispassionate reflection in polarising times when our personal position on the political spectrum is more likely to cloud our judgement. It is a call to eschew a lexicon of rigid binaries from the Cold War era — traitors vs patriots, honest vs corrupt, Muslim vs Kafir (Infidel), freedom fighter vs terrorists, secular vs religious, left vs right, and indeed several more. I am reminded of a slogan in Pakistan’s flagship feminist demonstration, the Aurat March: ‘Ye binary, Wo binary, No binary!’ (lit.,‘This binary’, ‘That binary’, ‘No binary’!)
Creating a vocabulary to describe what can be called a ‘wholesome’ Pakistani worldview is itself contentious. The issue of Islamic national identity remains unresolved, with Pakistanis still struggling to move beyond a ‘good Muslim, right-wing’ and ‘bad Muslim, Western liberal’ dichotomy.
Political Culture in the Information Age
In Making Sense of Pakistan, Farzana Shaikh argues that a major reason for Pakistan’s troubled relationship with Islam is that solutions are sought mostly in material terms. She writes that a generation of scholars inspired by the neo-Marxist tradition of the Cambridge School of History have looked at political and economic interests as causal factors of state dysfunction rather than as symptoms of underlying issues of national identity.
Such cultural work is more challenging today where new media is shaping the debate in unforeseen ways. In a very short time, Pakistan has transformed from being driven by a state broadcast logic where messaging flowed from ‘one to many’ to a social media logic where it flows from ‘many to many’. This shift has facilitated a people-centred politics that was absent even a decade ago when public discourse was dominated by élites, pundits and special interests.
Outside the mainstream, Sidra Kamran’s ethnography of working-class Muslim women on TikTok shows how Pakistani women challenge cultural norms by expressing sexuality in innovative ways, driving change in a conservative society. In the mainstream, Khan-era PTI has effectively harnessed grassroots pressures via social media: a study of online activity of four major national parties in the General Elections of 2013 found that the PTI Twitter messages were most diverse, interactive, issue-based, provided real-time updates, and called on citizens to vote through strategised online and offline campaigning.
PTI rallies exemplify media-driven mobilisations featuring contemporary and spiritual music, vibrant lighting and engaging speeches. Citizens young and old, celebrities and opinion leaders attend these events or participate remotely through large screens, creating a festive atmosphere that unifies attendees across social strata. Notwithstanding populist styles, for many the experience of these spectacles is of adiverse, energetic, hopeful, changing, sovereign, and post-modern Muslim Pakistan, in stark contrast to fossilised tropes of sacrifice, injustice, infidels, veiled women, ethnicities, incompetent authorities and victimhood upon which collective action was traditionally based.
Little wonder that in the February 2024 elections, millions voted for ‘independent’ candidates under military suppression, leading to PTI’s emergence, de jure, as the largest parliamentary party. The last time so many Pakistanis stood on one platform was in the late 1970s with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Pakistan’s third (and current) Constitution. Such public momentum can drive crucial initiatives like counter-extremism and reforms in a rentier economy. The Covid–19 crisis has demonstrated that service delivery issues require thoughtful collective action beyond abstract debates on democracy vs dictatorship.
Nation-building through the Media
Is the fact that Khan’s populism appeals to diverse social groups locally and in the diaspora (including working-class citizens of Islamist parties) really so bad? What practical solutions do secular Pakistanis have for a unity of purpose beyond study circles and ballroom conventions?
Literature on hate speech tells us that no matter how satisfied citizens may be, political entrepreneurs exploit insecurities for myopic and selfish objectives. It also shows that countering hate is simpler for governing small homogeneous communities than for large diverse populations.
Understanding naya (lit., ‘new’) in Pakistan is complex and rooted in a context. The experiment began with media liberalisation policies in the early 2000s, as a strategy by a weak state to improve capacity through cultural production. While it has given diverse citizens a voice, policies like the Single National Curriculum highlight potential excesses.
Khan was known and recognised globally (as one of Pakistan’s most successful and glamorous cricketers) long before populism became a buzzword, so framing his popularity with extremism is disingenuous. Pakistan’s historical burdens extend beyond the trends in mature democracies.
It will get worse before it gets better. But opportunities are there for those willing to accept radical change. In practice, not just words.
