‘Vote for Imran, vote for change’ is THE catchphrase these days. Having heard this line several times over after the successful rally that PTI held in Lahore, I was forced to ponder over the question.

While I was deliberating on the issue, I read this interesting article which encouraged PTI supporters to ask questions of Mr. Imran Khan; in the author’s words ‘Ask Khan difficult questions now because tomorrow you, and not him, will look really stupid if he gets it wrong or worse has nothing to offer.’ I thought long and hard over the issue of voting for PTI in the upcoming elections and decided to put my reasons down on paper.

After the protracted deliberation, the conclusions (in the form of questions) that I came to were as follows:

1. Are the promises being made by Imran Khan, realizable? If yes then does he have the potential to deliver on them?
2. Would he be able to secure numerical strength in these elections? Numerical strength which will be crucial to whether or not he can even think about initiating any system level changes.
3. If not PTI then would it be reasonable to vote for the alternatives? Is challenging status-quo really that important right now, given the already precarious state of affairs?

To begin with, Imran Khan comes across as extremely sincere talking about any issue and I think that alone merits him votes but since I was looking deeper than a sincere façade, I thought along three main lines vis-à-vis political, foreign and economic policy.

i.            Imran Khan’s take on foreign policy sounds extremely appealing but lacks substance on almost every occasion I have heard him. One of his catch-phrases on foreign policy issues is ‘I HAVE LIVED WITH THEM (WESTERNERS) AND HENCE KNOW THEM INSIDE OUT’, thereby reducing the entire world to his knowledge of a couple of ‘goras’. In retrospect that might have helped him courting socialites in Europe or America but foreign policy is a different ball-game altogether. He also displays naiveté when talking about his core issues of War-on-terror and drone strikes; I have myself heard him say on Kashif Abbasi’s show that he will ‘convince’ President Obama NOT to conduct drone strikes in Pakistan. Now I wish foreign policy was that simple an issue, but the reality couldn’t be further from Khan’s understanding of it.  Khan is also very vocal about reformulating foreign policy, but never mentions how he will wrest control of Pakistan’s foreign policy design from the men in uniform. In a normal modern state, the foreign policy dictates the defense policy. Quite ironically the converse is true in Pakistan’s case; it is our defense policy that dictates our foreign policy and authority for both rests with the army. Whether he will ‘convince’ Gen. Kiyani to hand over these to him or will he use ‘brute force’, has never been mentioned. Imran Khan’s stance on Taliban and other extremist elements in Pakistan is also found wanting and is cause for serious concern. Khan talks about unilateral ceasefire with the Taliban, without taking into account the fact that all previous treaties and dialogues with Taliban have ended in disaster. What he fails to grasp is that when dealing with militants, it is imperative to use a carrot and stick approach; militancy has never been ended by unilateral acceptance of militant demands, case in point being the 2008 peace treaty in Swat. He also ignores that the NATO coalition has been talking about holding talks with all Taliban who give up militancy and are willing to be incorporated into the political process. For some reason I can’t help but feel the argument of ‘strategic depth’ in play behind his silence against the Taliban.

ii.            On economics he has a consistent line centering on inflation and corruption. To begin with, he doesn’t seem to understand the simple fact that growth and inflation are intrinsically linked and you can’t have one without the other; once you adopt policies to promote growth, inflation would follow. Now bashing the finance ministry for having contributed to ‘mehngai’ might get PTI a couple of more votes but when it comes to macro-economic policy making, we’d be back to square one. Assuming that he wins the next election, this very thing will come to haunt him; when his cabinet sits down to work on fiscal and monetary policy, he will have to make the tough decisions being made by the current government. He has also come up with this magic number of Rs. 3 Trillion in losses that Pakistan is incurring due to corruption and inefficiency in tax collection. Imran says that he will cut down these losses by half (i.e. 1.5 trillion) in the very first year of his government.  Given that Pakistan’s budget deficit is under Rs. 1 Trillion, this would be amazing; however I am very skeptical about this target, given that no method or policy has been delineated which would help me quantify and estimate the probability of success. Also the timeline of 1 year looks totally unrealistic. To give you a better understanding of the issue, Pakistan has had the following average tax to GDP ratios decade wise:

(a) 1990 to 2000 – 11.17%
(b) 2000 to 2010 – 10.41%

(The decline from the nineties to 2000s was primarily because of trade liberalization whereby Pakistan dropped average effective rate of duty on imports from 30% in early nineties to below 6% by 2009-2010)

Whether this improvement will be made by better tax collection, increase in taxation or otherwise is not mentioned by Mr. Khan. Historically, Pakistan has been on the lower side with tax collection and it would do wonders to the state’s functioning if somehow this could be improved. However the reality of the issue is that previous regimes including the ‘amazing’ military governments (which were omnipotent, having all kinds of power at their behest) couldn’t increase this ratio despite numerous efforts, then how is Mr. Khan going to change that? Even if he wins a sizeable majority in parliament, would he be stronger than a military dictatorship in terms of executive authority?

iii.            On politics his favored line has been one of exclusionism. He has alienated everyone by calling them corrupt and/or incompetent, however at the same time he is accepting into the folds of PTI every tom, dick & harry abandoned or ostracized by mainstream parties. This would lead to two possible outcomes:

(a) Either people will stop taking him seriously and his image as a messiah will be tarnished
(b) Or he would go down the same road that he so loathes

Another trend that I have observed is his seemingly biased position on civil-military balance and his intentional drive to malign politicians and politics in general. Being a staunch believer in strengthening of democracy and strictly opposed to the idea of autocratic rule of any kind I feel his silence on military’s forays into the civil domain is disturbing. His ridicule of politics and the political domain would only help to weaken the already fragile structure of democracy in Pakistan. It would also pave way for the possibility of further proxy governments.

Moving on, after detailed talks with several senior PTI members, I have concluded that they themselves realize that PTI would at best get a handful of seats at the federal level and perhaps a slightly better count at the provincial level (particularly Punjab). Given that is the internal estimate, how does Mr. Khan envision changing the system? Politics is a game of numbers and a process of give & take and PTI has categorically rejected any such methodology where they will concede to other parties/individuals for presenting a common front. This again creates a catch 22 situation for Mr. Khan; if he decides to have a sit-down with other political parties (corrupt by PTI standards) for the general political process, he would be reneging on his word to his voters. If he doesn’t, he would be rendered ineffective and thereby cause more disillusionment in his followers when he will fail to deliver on the larger-than-life promises he has made.

To sum it up, the overall situation looks bleak for PTI. If they don’t win a majority in the upcoming elections, they wouldn’t have any real power to produce change. If they do win in majority (highly unlikely) then they stand the risk of causing even bigger disillusionment than we have now, because the problems that Mr. Khan has promised to fix, do not have any short term solutions and once he fails to deliver on them in the time-frame promised, the youth would feel completely betrayed. My heart tells me to vote for PTI but my mind tells me that he is not the logical choice and since I am defined by the choices I make, I choose to stay skeptical until my questions are answered.

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