Pakistan's political opposition has something that movements elsewhere would envy: a leader with a substantial popular following, a governing establishment facing widespread economic discontent, and two principal civilian rivals whose credibility has been eroded by years of political compromise. Yet it has repeatedly failed to translate these advantages into sustained mass mobilisation. Imran Khan remains the most recognisable figure in opposition politics, but his popularity has not produced a comparable capacity for collective action. The contradiction deserves more serious examination than another round of accusations about weak party workers or failed protest marches.

The problem is not that Pakistanis are content with their circumstances. Households face heavy utility bills, inadequate public services, insecure livelihoods and limited opportunities for their children. Nor is it that Khan has ceased to matter politically. The performance of PTI-backed independents in the February 2024 elections, despite formidable restrictions, demonstrated the resilience of his electoral support. But voting for a popular leader, sympathising with his imprisonment and joining a sustained political struggle are three very different forms of political participation.

The current confrontation illustrates the distance between them. PTI's recent protest plans have involved changing dates, consultations among competing centres of leadership, disputes over negotiations and a renewed march from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The demand for Khan's release remains central. In September, Senate opposition leader Raja Nasir Abbas declared that only Khan himself could postpone the planned march. The assertion demonstrated loyalty, but also exposed the difficulty of operating a national political movement when decisive authority rests with a leader who is incarcerated.

Repression is a major part of the explanation. Restrictions on expression, intimidation of political activists and the erosion of judicial independence have raised the costs of political participation. But repression does not fully explain why the opposition has struggled to develop a coherent response to the country's economic crisis, or why its enormous political energy has remained so heavily concentrated on the fate of one man. Pakistan's history offers two revealing contrasts. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto emerged as mass leaders during the 1960s because they connected struggles over political authority to the economic grievances of ordinary citizens. Their charisma mattered, but it was accompanied by programmes that gave those grievances political meaning.

Mujib's Six Points, presented in 1966, were ostensibly constitutional demands for provincial autonomy. Their political force, however, came from the economic argument developed by Bengali economists, including Rehman Sobhan, about the unequal distribution of public investment, foreign-exchange earnings and development opportunities between East and West Pakistan. Mujib made the relationship between political subordination and economic disadvantage intelligible to a mass audience. His programme identified the institutions through which resources were controlled and proposed a different distribution of authority.

Bhutto's political breakthrough rested on a different but equally powerful connection. Ayub Khan's decade of development had generated industrial growth alongside concentrations of wealth and privilege. Workers, students and sections of the peasantry increasingly questioned who benefited from the country's economic progress. Bhutto's promise of roti, kapra aur makan, supported by the PPP's original commitments to socialism and redistribution, gave these grievances an accessible political vocabulary. The struggle against Ayub was no longer merely about removing a military ruler; it was also about challenging an economic order.

Neither leader should be romanticised. Bhutto subsequently demonstrated authoritarian tendencies and pursued........

© The Friday Times