Cover Story
Chec
mate!
There is too much focus on saving the queen and losing sight of the king.
If you want entertainment, fiction usually comes in the form of a story told through the meticulous and clever use of words. If you, however, want to know the undeniable and absolute truth, that comes in numbers only. Numbers do not have emotion, they do not have faith, and they do not have a spin. Numbers just do not lie.
On the other hand, politics is one field of human affairs that I can think of where most of the lies are found and fabricated. It is all about emotions, the manipulation of faith, and a tremendous amount of spin. I would have never thought of finding a similarity between politics and mathematics in my wildest dreams. Just like math, politics and democracy, to be very precise, are all about numbers.
If we look at the United States, where a lavish election campaign happens every 4 years, which has become an entertainment lately, there are lies and manipulation involved during the entire election circus. However, the goal of all those lies by the presidential candidates is to tame the numbers to their advantage. Every US state has a specific number of Electoral College votes based on the population in that state. Everybody uses lies to get to the ultimate truth of numbers.
Pakistani politics is no different. Even though Pakistani democracy has had a chequered history, the practice of democracy is not devoid of numbers. Every challenge has its hack. Pakistani democracy, and there is no denying that it is quite a challenge, has its hack as well. It is called Punjab.
When I was very young, there used to be a TV commercial ad for the Red & White cigarettes. In the ad, there used to be some men, trying to impress a beautiful lady by playing the game of snooker, without any success. Moments later another man would appear who would be handsome and well-dressed. He not only played the shots right but also convinced the lady that he was the one and only. The next scene was the lady walking up in her red shoes with high heels to the handsome man and they would share the screen with laughter while smoking cigarettes. As a kid, I always thought that victory came with smoking those cigarettes. That is what the tobacco industry want us all to think.
Thankfully I didn’t grow up to be a smoker but the Punjab is no different to Pakistani politics than the branded cigarettes’ insinuation to winning snooker and the lady, all together. To win, Punjab must be bagged. Punjab is the most populated province in Pakistan. Having an overwhelmingly large number compared to the rest of the provinces in the country, Punjab plays the dominant role not only in politics but in sports, army recruitment, showbiz, civil services, and so forth.
In the practice of what democracy should be, an informed citizenry must be present making informed decisions, devoid of any emotion, over serious issues, affecting their lives. In the practice of the democracy we have, numbers are more important than awareness. Like it or not, that is the system in place. In my university days, I was a student who questioned the accepted norms and the perceived notions and followed the true and genuine understanding of things. There were others who didn’t do any of that and rather thought that I was weird but they always made sure to memorize the right coursework to do well in exams. They graduated with a much higher GPA than mine. They had found and focused on the exam hack. Hack and learning walk in opposite directions. I graduated with the lowest GPA in my entire university. I treat it as a badge of honour, in case you are wondering.
The point is that democracy has a method to it. It has its rules and that is the hack of it too. And here too, hack and genuine democracy walk in opposite directions. In simple words, numbers only determine the result in place of determining the quality of democracy or its ailing health. Numbers, based on the majority opinion, tell us about the winners and losers in the end.
The PML-N has always shaped its entire political ideology around victory in Punjab. This party, just like my classmates in university days, has only given importance to taming numbers to its benefit by winning Punjab. They too have focused on the hack. They also kept winning. Things, however, are changing. Perhaps weirds like yours truly are replicating there too. Many argue that the establishment changed their favourites. While that may or may not be true, the politics didn’t change per se, the people in the Punjab have changed. Their perceptions have changed. Their patience to put up with the boring, repetitive, rotten and smelly politics has had enough. They have parted ways with the erstwhile favourite party and have now started pinning their hopes to the PTI, led by Imran Khan.
Even with the PTI increasingly looking to be the new favourite of the Punjab province, the challenge of a hackable democracy remains for the PTI to fix. I say the PTI because given the role of the media in this country, I have given up on all hopes that journalism will create an informed citizenry. The most serious threat, which is also a national security threat facing the country, is not India or Israel but climate change. Only Imran Khan talked about it and advocated for something to be done about this threat. Other than that, the country doesn’t even talk about it. All we have are morning shows and shampoo ads followed by cell phone service ads offering free Facebook and WhatsApp.
Punjab is unquestioningly the queen of Pakistani political chess. However, let us not forget that those who focus too much on saving the queen lose sight of the king, which eventually leads to a checkmate. The queen is important as long as she serves the king.

Pakistan’s federating units (Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan), like all federations, not only have substantial political (de facto) asymmetries but also significant constitutional (de jure) asymmetries. They ipso facto differ in area, economy, social structure and demography.
Punjab is Pakistan’s most populous province. Its population at 120 million constitutes 52% of the country’s total population of 230 million. As against this, the combined population of the other three provinces (i.e., Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan) is only 110 million. Also, Punjab’s GDP is three-fifths of the national GDP.
With 173 out of 342 seats in the National Assembly, Punjab alone is a majority stakeholder in the lower house of the Parliament. Winning the battle for Punjab is thus crucial for any political party or a coalition of political parties to form a government at the Centre. Conversely, the recent political churn in the make-or-break by-polls in Punjab not only cost the PML-N (a Punjab-centric constituent of the fourteen-party Pakistan Democratic Movement) the provincial assembly of Punjab but also sent shivers down the spine of the PML-N dominated federal government.
What is the way out to mitigate the debilitating aspects of an asymmetric federation? Many political theorists contend that all constituent federating units should be viewed as “equal” in legal and constitutional terms. However, the suggested remedy is hard to implement in practice. Whether Pakistan’s existing four provinces be split into, say, ten “equal” provinces, or 37 provinces (converting each existing administrative division into a province), needs serious debate.
In a democracy, every vote matters. Electoral malpractices, however, distort the collective will of the voters. In Pakistan, electoral fraud is endemic, and it is an uphill task to organize and conduct elections ‘honestly, justly, fairly and in accordance with law’. If elections remain massively riddled with corruption, especially in a battleground province, the result is growing social unrest as also never-ending political turmoil.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be reached at imran.jan@gmail.com. His Twitter handle @Imran_Jan.
For almost four decades, the Sharif family has been active in Punjab’s politics. The family has enjoyed the Chief Minister’s position six times. Over the years, there have been forays on the PML-N fortress, most notably by the PML-Q. The Sharifs have been seen as the paramount political party of the Punjab. This is especially true when one considers that during the Musharraf era, the PML-N was a party in exile and the PML-Q cakewalked to the Takht-e-Lahore.However, in 2011 PTI mounted a serious challenge to PML-N’s hegemony. It could not break the status quo in 2013 but overcame it in the next general elections of 2018 and appointed its own chief minister. Since then, it has maintained a strong presence in the Punjab. Even a lacklustre chief minister and subsequent loss of the chief minister’s position after Imran’s ouster, was not enough to dent the party.
If anything, those blows only helped to rejuvenate the party. Hamza Shahbaz, PML-N’s designated Chief Minister and scion of the Sharif family, could not hold the seat for two months and was ousted after a series of political and legal moves by the PTI. From then, the PTI has only gone from strength to strength, hosting massive rallies and firing up its core base, which is hungry for change and is not ready to give any breathing room to the PML-N.
PTI’s power show on August 13 is just one more indication that the battle for Punjab is far from over and the tide is shifting away from the PML-N and firmly towards the PTI.