Smokers’ corner: narratives of decline

Illustration by Abro

Ever since 2014, politics in Pakistan has largely been about a battle of narratives. This is nothing new or something peculiar to Pakistan. But such battles haven’t been as intense earlier as they are now. This is mainly due to the presence of populist electronic media and the increasing usage of social media.
In Pakistan, between 2011 and today, the one constant in these battles has been Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). On most occasions, the other side was made up of parties such as the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). However, ever since Khan’s ouster in April 2022, another combatant was sucked into the battle: the military establishment (ME).
Although from 2011 till at least 2021, the ME was siding with Khan, he reconfigured his strategy when he began to accuse the ME of being part of a grand ‘regime change’ plot that saw a ‘vote of no confidence’ succeed against his government in the parliament.
But by then, PTI had already mastered various tactics of effectively proliferating its narrative through electronic and social media. Till late 2021, the ME was quite unabashedly aiding the party in achieving this. This was before the appointment of the current military chief Gen Asim Munir. When PTI’s narrative began to target Gen Munir, the ME seemed stumped, despite the fact that the ‘training’ that PTI received to master the tactics was allegedly provided by the military’s media wing.
PTI’s narrative succeeded in rooting itself in the minds of many Pakistanis, including those in the military, the judiciary and the media. But what was the narrative that helped turn Khan into a ‘popular’ and, in some cases, even a messianic figure in the eyes of various urban and peri-urban segments — especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in northern and central Punjab?
From 2011 till he became prime minister in 2018, the narrative displayed Khan as a dashing personality who was also admired abroad, and was ‘incorruptible’. He was the former sporting hero who had led the Pakistan cricket team to win the 1992 World Cup and was now ready to lead Pakistan as a politician. The narrative portrayed the PML-N and the PPP as being entirely ‘corrupt’. It peddled Khan as a pious father-figure (but still ‘handsome’) who was leading a ‘jihad’ against corruption.
Then, during his tenure as prime minister (2018-2022), the narrative widened its ‘Islamic’ allusions — especially when Khan began to stumble on various fronts, mostly in the areas of economics and foreign policy. Nevertheless, till his ouster, the narrative remained what is referred to as a ‘narrative of progress.’
Indeed, the narrative presented PTI’s opponents as existential threats because of their ‘greed’, but it was mostly about Khan being a ‘visionary’ whose policies would make the Pakistani passport one of the most powerful in the world, and turn Pakistan into a country where many foreigners would come to work.

There was also mention of launching ingenious programmes, such as a chicken-breeding programme, through which the chickens would start laying an exponential number of eggs. The narrative was also about Khan’s ‘deep’ understanding of the works of poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and of Islam, which would aid him in making Pakistan a true ‘Islamic welfare state.’
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. According to the political scientist S.R. Shenhav, political narratives are largely constructed from certain perceptions of reality and not necessarily from reality itself. They don’t deal in data or in cold facts. Instead, they deal in perceptions and emotions. They operate in a framework of a particular worldview. If a worldview is widespread, the narrative is then likely to find more takers.
When it became clear that Khan’s regime was struggling, the narrative started to lose traction. As a consequence, the narrative’s ‘Islamic’ aspects were enhanced, but to no avail. Khan’s narrative of progress was built on ‘over-promises’ and utopian middle class yearnings. But then, something interesting happened when Khan lost power. He refigured the nature of his narrative. From being a narrative of progress it became, what political science refers to as, a “narrative of decline.”
The political scientist Robert Ralston calls it ‘declinism’. He argues that declinism most often comes from opposition brokers. Brokers bring disparate groups and individuals together. They blame the nation’s decline on the establishment. Ralston adds that negative events or conditions help narratives of decline resonate with audiences.
Narratives of decline are largely constructed from clubbing together pessimistic perceptions. Whereas a narrative of progress may slide into utopian territory, a narrative of decline slides the other way, into dystopian domains. After his ouster, Khan unleashed a narrative of decline in which he saw his dismissal as a symptom of Pakistan’s inevitable decline as a nation-state. The narrative then began to use examples of Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown. To Khan, this was where Pakistan was headed.
In February 2023, when dozens of Pakistanis drowned while trying to illegally reach Italy on a boat, Khan explained this as the desperation of people wanting to leave a Pakistan that was on the brink of facing dreadful events such as economic bankruptcy, anarchy and civil war. Unfortunately, Pakistanis have been drowning to reach Europe since the 1990s, but the 2023 tragedy was co-opted by Khan’s narrative as an event that had something to do with his ouster.
Khan’s narrative of decline reinvigorated the disheartened supporters of Khan. In this narrative, he became the only person capable of stalling the country’s ‘downfall’. In May 2023, PTI activists and leaders poured out and began attacking military buildings and installations. Many were arrested, but most courts refused to sentence them, on one technicality or another.
However, a year later, when the ME arrested the former pro-Khan chief of the ISI, retired Lt Gen Faiz Hameed, this was a sign that the ME now had enough material to finally shape a counter-narrative that portrays the May 2023 riots as a widespread plot to instigate a mutiny within the armed forces.
PTI, Khan and their alleged ‘facilitators’ in the judiciary and the media, and some former military officers, should be concerned, because the counter-narrative is being built on allegedly solid evidence and not just perceptions. The counter-narrative not only views these elements as doomsayers and architects of anti-Pakistan propaganda, but also outright enemies of the state.
Published in Dawn, EOS, August 25th, 2024