Ever since the rise of Imran Khan’s PTI in 2011, much has been alluded to about how the PTI has evolved into becoming the ‘new PPP.’

An observer is advised not to jump to any knee-jerk conclusions in this regard. At least, not without first understanding the historical contexts in which both the parties emerged.

The PPP was the brainchild of Z.A. Bhutto and a Marxist ideologue, J.A. Rahim. Formed in 1967 to challenge the Ayub Khan regime (of which Bhutto was once a part), the party was conceived as a broad platform to co-opt progressive men and women of all shades.

Author and researcher, Philip E. Jones, who, between 1967 and 1974, stationed himself in Pakistan to conduct a detailed study of the formation and coming to power of the PPP, suggests in his 2003 book, that Bhutto understood the PPP as “a broad coalition of progressive elements”.

Jones suggests that Bhutto’s inspiration in this respect was the manner in which Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had transformed the All India Muslim League (AIML) into a wide-ranging coalition of Muslim nationalists just before the all-important provincial elections in British India in 1945-46.

To emerge as the leading Muslim party in India, Jinnah had encouraged the entry of Muslim nationalists from multiple spheres of politics.

For example, whereas once the League was purely the domain of a section of the Muslim landed elite, by the early 1940s, it had in it bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie Muslim nationalists which included socialists and social democrats on the left, liberal democrats and the landed gentry in the centre, and Islamic scholars on the right who agreed with the League’s programme.

Jones quotes Bhutto lamenting the loss of such a coalition after Jinnah’s demise in 1948. He (Bhutto) then describes the PPP as being an extension of Jinnah’s coalition which in essence was progressive.

The PPP’s ideological make-up was largely authored by intellectuals through literary monthlies such as Nusrat, and papers written by men such as J.A. Rahim.

Nusrat, an Urdu magazine, was being edited by poet and scholar, Hanif Ramay who used it to explain the PPP as a party attempting to merge modern democratic socialism with Muslim nationalism and the “Quranic concepts of egalitarianism”.

At the time of its inception, the PPP was vehemently anti-clergy because it saw the clergy and the religious parties as “agents of feudal lords and monopolist capitalists”.

It posed itself as a left-leaning Muslim nationalist party as opposed to an entirely socialist unit. The last bit is an exaggeration by later chroniclers.

Bhutto had arrived fully matured as a political thinker, but Khan is still a work-in-progress

Imran’s party, formed in 1996, largely emerged as a small one-agenda entity. It was anti-corruption. Khan was a charismatic former captain of the country’s cricket team and a respected philanthropist.

Since he wasn’t as cerebral as Bhutto, there were no intellectuals in his party to navigate its ideological discourse or devise a historical context behind its creation.

PTI emerged purely as a reaction to the political and economic chaos of the 1990s in which the PPP of Benazir Bhutto, and the PML-N of Mian Nawaz Sharif, were central players, along with certain shadowy remnants of the Zia dictatorship.

Khan was a political novice. Much of his youth had been spent as a cricketing star known as much for his partying lifestyle as much as he was for his sporting skills.

Then, sometime in the early 1990s, during an identity crisis of sorts which he suffered after his retirement from cricket, and, more so, due to the death of his mother (from cancer), he began consulting a respected and moderate religious scholar Malik Murtaza.

Khan shaped his party as a political manifestation of a spiritual awakening which he believed he had experienced; and which, supposedly, compelled him to agitate “against corruption and injustice”.

After addressing his spiritual crisis, Khan moved ahead to gain a political education.

Khan’s initial information in this regard was gained from a retired general who had played a prominent role during Gen Zia’s regime in facilitating Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan, and in changing the ideological mindset of the military establishment.

He was Gen Hameed Gul. Gul made Khan understand politics in black and white. To him, Western political and cultural ideas were keeping Muslim countries enslaved and undermining the role of faith in their societies.

But Gul soon had a falling out with Khan when the latter married a British heiress, Jemima Goldsmith.

Then, Khan’s transcendental awakening and his early understanding of politics imparted to him by the likes of Gul, naturally drew him towards the well-evolved ideology of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI).

JI’s influence helped Imran express his ideas through assorted religious idioms. JI had played an important role in reshaping the meaning of Pakistan nationalism during the Zia regime.

Pakistan nationalism, from the rise of Jinnah’s AIML in the 1940s, till about the mid-1970s, had meant to be a South Asian expression of Muslim nationalism. Muslim nationalism had understood Muslims as communities that were one in faith but separated by distinct cultural and geographical boundaries in which they could thrive as separate nations.

But many religious scholars opposed to Jinnah had rejected this nationalism. They felt it negated their faith’s universal appeal and also undermined pan-Islamic aspirations.

From the late 1970s onward, after the weakening of the earlier idea of Pakistan nationalism, religious parties (and then the state) began explaining Pakistan as a ‘bastion of faith’ and a launching pad for the political universalisation of Islam.

This is why from the 1980s onward, many Pakistanis have struggled to explain themselves according to the reality of their geographical and national boundaries.

Instead, most see themselves as theological abstractions related to the coming of some global politico-religious realm!

This has created much confusion about exactly what constitutes Pakistan’s ideology.

Bhutto had arrived fully matured as a political thinker, but Khan is still a work in progress. Just like parties such as the JI have now mostly good words for the man that it helped topple in 1977, Khan too has begun to view Bhutto as some kind of a misunderstood patriot.

So a typical Khan speech now moves left towards the old PPP progressivism, even leaning towards Bhutto’s archetypal populist demagoguery; and then to the right from where Pakistani nationalism begins to be redefined as something militaristic, celestial, and unbounded by geography.

Indeed, Bhutto too had moved towards such a mixed narrative, but only when he was being cornered by a protest movement against him in 1977. This narrative devoured him, and then set the scene for a reactionary dictator, and a future wrought with ideological confusion, and, consequentially, violence.

With the fortunes of the present-day PPP plummeting, Khan and his party matter a lot especially to a whole new generation of Pakistani youth.

Imran is thus well advised to bring in some erudite thinkers into the party who can give the ideological narrative of the PTI a more cohesive direction, as opposed to the one that is a chaotic fusion of the old PPP rhetoric, and flighty idioms of politico-religious ideologues.

A new space is opening up, requiring a more economics-friendly program and an ideology which revitalises and updates Jinnah’s Muslim nationalism, and does not repeat the kind of demagogic and mythical idea of nationhood which has for long retarded our nationalistic evolution and endeavours.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine May 1st, 2016