This unpublished piece was written shortly before the 2018 election
21 July 2018
PRIOR to the tragic attack on Haroon Bilour, the stronghold of Awami National Party (ANP) in Charsadda was packed with a sea of people waving the red flags of the ANP.
The peculiar nature of the upcoming Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) elections is best described by the story narrated by a young, Pashto broadcast journalist who was covering said ANP rally.
What is striking about his story is that the young worker attending the rally initially said he would be voting in favour of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) and he was only at the rally to pacify his father who was an ardent ANP voter, however after the rally he had a change of heart.
Anecdotes like this remind us how this 2018 election is a time when a hand full of myths about KP and especially what has been described as the 'Imran Khan factor' ought to be challenged.
The myths given here are not that difficult to unpack when taking into account the evidence before us.
The first myth is that KP does not re-elect the same government twice.
The province voted against the PPP wave of 1970, in favour of the PNA and PML-N in 1977 and 1993 respectively and voted for the MMA over PML-Q and for ANP over PPP in 2008. It was this pattern that has created the conventional wisdom that no party can win re-election in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The reality is a bit more complicated, in face that the PML-N was re-elected in the 1993 elections but with a different Chief Minister namely, Pir Sabir Shah. Further, by virtue of coalition politics, parties like ANP were elected in 1997, initially working in coalition with other ruling party's.
The second prevalent myth is that KP incumbents are punished for not delivering on promises.
Just over a year ago the odds looked stacked against PTI. Its mandate in 2013 was, contrary to media spin quite fragile. It had only narrowly won a plurality vote share and had formed a weak coalition with the JI, independents and Aftab Sherpaos QWP. Unfortunately, the PTI was driven by factionalism with a Chief Minister of dubious work ethic, whilst being held hostage to the whims of party dissidents and their junior allies within JI. On the ground the province was devastated by TTP linked violence early on and in equal measure struggled with indifference by the Federal government on key projects like CPEC.
So while on the surface although it seems reasonable to assume these myths have a valid basis, when we look a bit deeper we find the key trends that have shifted the sands behind these two calculations.
The first myth is driven by simple demographics, KP has the second highest bloc of young voters in the 18 to 35 years age group, 48 pc against the national average of 43pc in the rest of the country. These are first or second time voters who do not necessarily share the voting preferences of the previous generation. This is further complicated by the high levels of competition amongst voters and candidates reflected in the province having the second highest number of candidates per seat after Balochistan.
This youth bulge has converged with technology and social media to create a voter who absorbs information very differently from the voter from ten years ago. Many following the global trend of taking in information from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. The numbers of Facebook users alone, is nationally now at 33 million from 8.6 million in 2012 with 35 million smart phone users - a whopping seven fold increase from the 5-6 million in 2012. PTI being an early adopter of these technologies has benefitted by being able bypass the traditional media according to it's needs, to get its message out. So one can presume that for a voter lost due to disillusionment in the government’s performance it offsets that loss with the addition of new voters and that too in areas they did not have support before.
The third myth was that KP's provincial governments were vulnerable to federal government pressure being elected to the province which worked against the winning party. This was proven in the past from 1972-1973 NAP governments toppling and by the challenges faced by the PML-N government in 1993 as well as the MMA from 2002-2007. This myth has been challenged directly as a consequence of the subsequent 18th amendment and the associated devolution of power, which led to an increase in the provincial budget from Rs 170.904 billion for the fiscal year 2008-2009 to Rs 603 billion in 2017-18. This increase provided crucial fiscal space for PTI to spend heavily on a variety of initiatives. An example of this can be seen in the health budget which went from
Rs. 30.3 billion
in 2012-13 to Rs. 66.49 billion in 2017-2018. In relative terms this has been a big change but in absolute terms this has been a modest increase.
For the public, this relative increase influences the perceptions of delivery by the government.
While initiatives of the government do not stand up to scrutiny, in terms of perception they are enough to ensure the party’s support has broadened. The dark side to this is that the heavy increase in spending on big projects initiated and the increase in salary due to recruitment drives means the provinces finances will face a major economic crisis within the next two or three years. It also leads to disillusioned supporters of the party when the realities of acts of omission and commission by the party are later revealed.
It is pertinent to note here that despite the tragic recent attacks, overall the security situation has largely been improving. The contrast is stark, from a peak of 5497 casualties in 2009 to 29 being the highest number in 2017.
A fourth myth is that the opposition is far more organised this time compared to last time.
There is an element of truth in this as there is no smoke without a fire, especially in the case of the ANP which in the last election was devastated by relentless terrorist attacks, according to one estimate in 2016 they had lost over 500 workers and several legislators too. However, a lack of serious reflection within the party’s after the last election has meant that where workers were well organized, like in the ANP, or where electables have been brought in like with the JUI-F the party’s now lack the ability to attract new voters. Critically the opposition has decided for reasons best known to their leadership to go solo when their biggest anti pti successes have been together.
The ensuing instability created a vacuum that coincided with a generational leadership transition in the PPP towards Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, ANP towards Aimal Wali and Haider Hoti, JUI-F towards Maulana Lutfur Rehman and PML-N towards Maryam Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif. This has created a vacuum and by virtue of the dictum “nature abhors a vacuum” it has left PTI with a clear advantage.
Next, the 'Imran Khan factor' is probably the most contested myth, with many critics of Imran Khan arguing that one reason for his popularity is the political vacuum of the 2000s. From 2004 till 2013 he received unprecedented levels of media coverage at a time when his electoral support was negligible. This advantage packaged with his populist slogans as key reasons for his support. There is truth to this as his own celebrity status created a platform which helped him to reach out to future supporters. It is true that his populism has certain appeals. But it is also equally true that other politicians have received disproportionate coverage in comparison with Sheikh Rashid for example, and some other politicians also attempting to use populist rhetoric without being able to translate it into mass support. If however, media coverage was the main indicator to measure this, one would expect areas with the highest television penetration and those that spoke in the same language as the electorate like Karachi or Urban Punjab to be areas of highest support for PTI and not Pashto speaking areas with less media penetration, let alone coverage.
The answer to this then comes back to the understanding of populism and the socioeconomic changes KP went through compared to other provinces. Populisms inherently employing an 'us versus them' framing is most successful, when the other side is discredited or fragmented and when it converges with technological change. In case of KP the weakness and fragmentation of the opposition was combined by convergence of unregulated social media with PTI's support within the media, this combination has gave the party crucial advantages for the upcoming elections.
Finally, the myth of the role of the establishment with respect to KP. It’d be a gross untruth to suggest there is no state level interference in this election. However, within the context of KP on its own - for reasons explained earlier - there seems to be little need for large scale interference. Keeping that in mind, what is going on in Punjab or Balochistan is then relatively at a larger scale than what is currently occurring in KP. The only other threat to PTI's re-election is a sympathy wave for PML-N in KP. While that was truly a possibility under Maryam Nawaz - whose keen interest in KP was in contrast to that of her uncle - the ongoing case means no challenge from this party is likely to be seen from there.
In the final calculation PTI's KP victory looks comfortable. In a time of the 2018 elections - short of some major misstep. Demography, populism, technology circumstances and Imran Khan in a time of political vacuum. The misreading of what is to come is a consequence of a provincial political elite that does not as yet fully understand all factors which can potentially lead to this.
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