IT is a sorry farce. With the powers that be bent on making the situation difficult for Imran Khan and his PTI, new parties have been carved out from the latter’s enfeebled corps, seemingly in order to weaken the former prime minister and sabotage his chances at re-election. Even though Jahangir Tareen’s Istehkam-i-Pakistan Party failed to make a strong first impression, another bet seems to have been placed on the PTI’s former KP chief minister, Pervaiz Khattak. On Monday, Mr Khattak, after surrounding himself with a few dozen former MPAs and MNAs from the PTI — some of whom, it later transpired, had no clue as to why they had been summoned — formally launched his political party. It quickly became clear that, as was the case with the IPP, the PTI-Parliamentarians lacks a raison d’être in the form of a party manifesto. Its strategy, for now, appears focused on seizing political space in KP while the IPP cleans up the spoils in Punjab. Why has the establishment opted for this strategy? Why is it introducing new spoilers in the electoral field? That is a question for the other political parties to ponder.

In Pakistan’s experience, politicians do not simply form new parties unless they have secured some form of ‘backing’. So, is the field being set to ensure that no single party emerges as the clear winner in the next general elections? Are we to have yet another hung parliament, beholden to the diktats of those who will not be accountable for their interventions in the governance process? Will we see another ‘civilian’ government scapegoated when this latest experiment starts to fail, say, three or four years down the road? Considering the experience of the 2018 polls, the above possibilities are not unlikely. The need for ‘stability’ has been a common refrain as analysts and policymakers grapple with the many crises that have seized Pakistan over the past year or so. It has been abundantly clear that Pakistan needs a strong government at the centre to guide it through its present challenges. Instead, what we are essentially seeing is an effort to ensure that decision-making remains in the hands of those who do not answer to the public. The way the political landscape is shaping up — rather, being engineered — seems to be a sure recipe for disaster in this context.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2023