Entwinement of Politics and Political Leadership in Pakistan (i)

S Zulfiqar Gilani

One repeatedly hears that Pakistan would be a much better country if Muhammed Ali Jinnah had not died just over a year after independence in August 1947. Since then, numerous political figures have come and gone, and there has been considerable debate about their good or bad impact on politics and society. The lament of Jinnah’s untimely death and the debates around the impact of subsequent political leaders point to a general realisation that the entwinement of political leaders and politics is significant, though serious scholarship on that is negligible. There is however considerable international literature on this that can help our understanding of the situation in Pakistan.

Politics in Pakistan is only about partisan one-upmanship and attainment of power, wealth and status, without any consideration of the values that ultimately undergird political actions. For example, in politics focused on winning elections and attaining power by any means, it is ignored that more importantly such actions reveal a certain set of values. Similarly, the shifting-with-the-winds opportunism of public figures and political leaders, and their indifference to truth, consistency and accountability, are also indications of a certain set of values. In the political landscape where there is exclusive focus on achievement of concrete goals, anyone highlighting values undergirding politics is considered not to be a ‘real politician’ and even a threat.

Politics has been reduced to brazen contests of political clout and wealth, which has introduced force, fraud, lies, and manipulation of appearances into every political domain. Values have become mere platitudes and lost their worth, depth and endurance; their relationship to a worldview, conscience and conduct, and to their important capacity to shaping the moral order. By association with wealth or official position or personalities or material things, values have been trivialised and are malleable, opportunistic, histrionic, and hyperbolic. Trivialised values are being used as instruments of power, which further degrades their integrity and worth. The instrumentalisation of the degraded and trivialised values is self-perpetuating, where power breeds more power, wealth more wealth, and chicanery more chicanery. And there is normalisation of deceit and criminality in both high and low places, and a mass withdrawal into the trivial, immediate, and personal.

Politics has been overtaken by bureaucracy and reduced to administration, technocracy, vested interest, or raw powerplay, in which values have no place. Further, politics based on platitudes and/or trivialised values has infected all spheres of life, including, but not limited to, policymaking, governance, bureaucratic practices, the criminal justice system, academe, education and curriculums, health, and production and consumption. For example, such politicisation of the criminal justice system has resulted in the powerful having de facto immunity, and legislation and enforcement (of laws) being geared to the protection and advantage of the elite and to the detriment and disadvantage of the ordinary citizen. Similarly, adjudication is also politicised and selective. The situation is by now so brazen and degraded that even the pretence of non-political status of the criminal justice system has been shed. In addition, the powerful do not heed legal constraints on political engagement and use the instruments of the politicised state machineries to the end of power-grabbing.

We thus witness a moral and ethical chaos, and assertions of power and appetites and desires without concern for accountability, justice, or the future. There is breaking of a social compact with others, and with succeeding generations. There is separation of means from ends, where ends justify any means, which distorts ends and make them worthless while the machineries controlling the means attain unprecedented power.

Politics based on platitudes and trivialised values, and dominated by self-centred and psychologically wanting demagogues whose appetites for power and wealth are insatiable, is well-entrenched in Pakistan. Nevertheless, meaningful and sustainable disruption of such politics is possible only through politics that is value-imbued and ethical, which in our context is highly challenging. Those invested in a more just, democratic and emancipatory order must kindle the desire for such an order, associate it with a worldview, and channelise it into a viable political project. In that regard, a common misconception is that of locating the problem in the people, as they don’t seem to be enthused and driven by their ‘true’ interests of achieving equality and emancipation, which is ascribed to ‘false consciousness’ (a nuanced form of victim-blaming). It is true that due to their abstract nature, most people are not energised to political position and action directly by the desire for equality and emancipation. Nevertheless, they are variously engaged politically, which is determined more by their perceptions, feelings, desires and historical and sociocultural contexts, and less by rational, economic and philosophical or abstract considerations.

In the political sphere, reason, economics, culture, history, feelings and desires are intertwined, but for most the last ones are more powerful than reason and economics. Major thinkers like Gramsci, Marcuse, Stuart Hall, among others, consider that in politics, culture, feelings and desires, rather than economics and reason, are the sources of political enthusiasm for (revolutionary) change. So, rational argument and economic benefits by themselves do not energise them politically, nor turn them away from the seductions of wealth or power or authoritarianism or chicanery or supremacies or false versions of freedom, nor impact political positions and attachments. Further, harkening to past glory or science or administrative and technocratic solutions may be apparently and temporarily appealing, but do not engender widespread and sustainable change in political perspectives, positions and actions, and therefore cannot solve political problems.

Although feelings and desires are not infinitely malleable, through a certain kind of engagement they can be redirected. The task is to draw the connections of the broader concerns of equality and emancipation with people’s feelings, desires, historical and sociocultural contexts and everyday pragmatic difficulties, and translate them into political thinking and action, which is a political education or consciousness-raising exercise.

The wellspring of status quo disruption is challenging the powers, routines and assumptions of individuals, forces and machineries dominating the given present. However, on its own such a challenge garners only short-term support and popularity. For a sustainable challenge and disruption, the character and role of those who are leading the charge (hereon ‘transformational leader/s’) is critical, and in that their stance towards power is very important. Power is a significant and unavoidable aspect of politics, and the striving for power is one of its primary driving forces. However, the striving for power is destructive when that itself becomes the end-purpose and leaders start boasting about, flaunting and revelling in it. Transformational leaders are also attracted to power but do not become intoxicated or blinded by it or make it an end. They are gratified by their capacity to influence people and history, but do not succumb to temptations of vanity or narcissism. They are committed to a cause and a worldview but are neither egoistic nor obsessional about them and have the humility to recognise that every cause is in context, and a matter of reasoned belief and judgement, and not absolute.

The power of ideal transformational leaders is rooted in actions that are contoured by a combination of conviction, restraint, responsibility and far-sightedness. They differ from others in their ability to balance inner determination and conviction, and inner restraint. They have ego-strength, demonstrated by their convictions and commitment to a cause, but do not suffer from the malignancy of ego-inflation, in which case the (inflated) ego ceases to be a vehicle for the cause, and instead itself becomes the cause. When a political leader becomes the cause, rather than a vehicle for a cause, self-reflection, detachment, restraint, and above all responsibility fall away, and the thrill of power takes centre-stage. Transformational leaders are ethical regarding concrete, pragmatic and specific circumstances rather than abstract principles, and the ethic is rooted in values. They are also aware and have the resolve to guard against pressures to formalise, regulate, tame or institutionalise their ego, as that will destroy their uniqueness.

The motivational force of such leadership is the tension between determination and restraint, which is embodied in the ‘ethic of responsibility’ that in Weber’s words combines “heated passion and a cool sense of proportion” to achieve a “trained ruthlessness” toward one’s cause and a “distance from people and things”. The ethic of responsibility curbs vanity and self-intoxication, which is the deadly enemy of dedication to a cause, and results in identification with, rather than distance from, the imprint one is trying to make on history and from the power one wields for that aim. At the same time, the ethic of responsibility entails the realisation that history and humanity do not have a natural or necessary ethical shape or unfold from good and pure intentions or reason alone.

For transformational political leaders, politics is a vocation or calling, where the ethic of conviction is combined with the ethic of responsibility. They are relentlessly committed to a cause, but at the same time feel fully responsible for the consequences of their actions. That ethic circumscribes and affirms politics as the domain where value is articulated, fought for and transformed, rather than a place where pristine value is realised. They recognise that political values are a matter of progressive self-discovery in a relational context, rather than something that can be infused in pristine form through books or sermons and advice or imposition through legislation or force. Above all, this ethic entails a sacrifice of their own self, but not of others’, to a vision and cause, and a steadfast refusal to reduce political life to individual interest, advantage, power-position, or security.

Transformational leaders disrupt the status quo not through a frontal attack but through a challenge based on an understanding of the existing order and its coordinates. Their aim is not to outright destroy the prevailing order and power arrangements, but to confront and re-form them with as little violence as possible. They recognise that the struggle is not against armies or individual tyrants, but against a worldview, bureaucratic torpor, political machinations, cynicism, defeatism, and the temptations of power stripped of connection to integrity, responsibility, vision and purpose. So, their struggle is not based on impulsive anger or vendetta or personal advantage. At the same time, they can doggedly pursue new paths to achieve an alternative that is not based on the past, myth, or utopia.They resist cynicism, fatalism and despair, and have the fortitude to stay the course amid endless setbacks and deep disappointments. Paraphrasing Weber, their spirit will not be broken if the world does not or is not ready to accept what they have to offer, but who can, despite tremendous countervailing pressures, remain steadfast. So, for transformational leaders the antidote to despair is not hope, but grit, spiritual, emotional, and practical. Finally, but importantly, transformational political leaders hold lessons for and inspire social movements and individuals alike. And the character demands of such political leaders also extend to anyone who cares about political life, justice, or the future.

The perception of, and responses to, a leader, however, are in a specific temporal and sociocultural context. Thus, someone gaining popularity and allegiance in a certain society during a certain time-period may not represent all the characteristics of a transformational leader in pure form. Nevertheless, if despite the opposition of politicians and oppression of state machineries, popularity and allegiance keep increasing, and as well ordinary citizens demonstrate increasing political awareness, then such a leader is playing a transformational role.

Despite the context of our bleak political history of inequality, oppression and injustice, the culture of dissent and resistance and the desire for equality and emancipation are discernible in folklore, poetry, literature, humour, and occasionally in politics. And whenever a political leader or party is perceived to symbolise a challenge to the existing order and as champions of equality, emancipation and people’s rights, at least a significant minority and sometimes a majority have identified with and given them their allegiance.

Currently, our politics is thoroughly value-degraded and corrupt; the machineries of state are engaging in criminality and brutality to protect the status quo and subvert the challenge; the citizenry faces oppression and many pragmatic/economic and psychological difficulties, including anger, frustration, and anxiety about the present and the future, and a pall of gloom pervades our political landscape and society.

However, the combination of the very difficult conditions and the presence of a challenge with transformational ingredients seem to have set in motion a relatively fast-track process of political education. More and more people seem to be developing a better understanding of the machinations of the status quo forces, which stand exposed; clearer perspectives on the character/s of political leaders and nature of political parties; the place of value in politics and life, and the broad contours of the struggle for true emancipation. Thus, people are increasingly making their own judgements and choices about who deserves their allegiance, where they themselves stand politically, and what is their place in the struggle. The overall trajectory of politics is thus the strengthening of the challenge, resolve and grit, and corresponding weakening of the status quo forces and machineries and defections in their ranks. However, a cabal of the latter still control most instruments of state power, which they are using to fight back viciously. And one can only hope that there isn’t too much more rampage and destruction as the struggle unfolds.

(i) Inspired by Wendy Brown (2023): “Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber”, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.