... aka
Taliban Khan, who is the lightweight's lightweight...
's tirades against election irregularities continue unabated, one is tempted to remind him that, as self-anointed leader of the country's massive population of young people, he was supposed to win a landslide victory in last year's election. Given that almost two-thirds of Paks are under 25 years of age, and the great Khan had them all under his spell, no amount of pre-poll rigging should have mattered anyway.
Of course, Pakistain's young people cannot all be neatly clumped together with no consideration for class, ethnicity, gender and much else. Rhetorical claims aside, right-wing populists in today's Pakistain inevitably fail to make good on their lofty promises — whether they lay claim to power through the ballot box or mythical 'revolutions' — because 'the people' are anything but the monolith that their sloganeering suggests.
It is nevertheless worth dwelling on the rhetoric to get a sense of what categories are considered to have political traction. So, a Qadri, Khan or Sharif will invoke the 'poor', the 'youth' and even the 'minorities' regularly in their speeches and propaganda literature. Such populists might even raise questions about the mistreatment of certain ethnic groups. But no one ever mentions women.
Pakistain is amongst the most patriarchal societies in the world, and there is simply no question of articulating a political project seeking fundamental change without foregrounding the oppression and exclusion of women, and popularising a programme to dismantle patriarchal structures. Yet there is not a single mainstream party in the country that is willing and able to make the liberation of women a major plank of their political discourse, let alone practice.