Our country is in the grip of a worse form of political and social polarisation. It is a strange phenomenon that, instead of social realities shaping politics, politics is shaping social attitudes. Social particularism and the concomitant antagonism towards rival political creeds have become a household phenomenon.

The reasons ascribed to this socio-political stratification are the heightened political consciousness of a young cohort of the population due to greater exposure to social media and the digital revolution, plus the boiling frustrations born out of a broken-down governance and political system. But then, was this not the case in the roaring seventies, when left-wing populism and its various variants, such as Islamic socialism, captivated the imagination of the masses, who showed the same zeal while opting for Roti, Kapra aur Makaan?

It was a déjà vu moment for older generations when they observed the same fanatical devotion inspired by Imran Khan’s populist slogans of accountability, reform, and change, which had earlier been inspired by the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's populist slogans. But why did these promised dawns morph into the “night-bitten” dawns of Faiz Ahmed Faiz? Why did the two revolutions founder on the rocks of political authoritarianism and expedient politics? Was there something wrong with the leaders or the led? Or was it the fallow political soil in which the fecund seeds of promised revolutions failed to germinate? Were the Pied Pipers playing the wrong tune, leading the expectant but gullible followers down a lemming-like, self-destructive path? Were the slogans of change merely a political subterfuge to amass political power?

It is a well-known fact that Imran Khan was brought in as a promised Messiah by the Deep State, which, in the process, caught the popular imagination and used his moment in the sun to make fantastic promises. Millions of houses and millions of promised jobs were attractive slogans but unrealizable goals that were articulated to assuage the hope-soused political sensibilities of the deprived masses, especially the young and frustrated generation.

How Cultural Populism Provides Staying-Power To Political Populism

It was later........

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