Will PM Khan be third time lucky with his information ministry?
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Prime Minister Imran Khan has done it again. He has changed the leadership of his federal information ministry – hoping the third time will be the charm in shoring up the image of a government taking a renewed battering in public opinion by its generally underwhelming and often chaotic response to the Covid-19 crisis.
The surprise, however, is not the change at the helm of the ministry because the outgoing in-charge, Firdous Ashiq, was one of the most unpopular cabinet members ever and proved to be an embarrassment. In fact, when her predecessor Fawad Chaudhry was asked on a TV program about her unceremonious sacking, he burst out laughing and said she should have seen the door much earlier.
The real surprise is that Khan has appointed two persons with cabinet rank to look after his propaganda ministry. Shibli Faraz, leader of the treasury benches in the Senate, is the new federal information minister while a high profile, recently retired general, Asim Bajwa, will serve as special assistant to the prime minister on information.
While this unfamiliar brand of full-time leadership of a single ministry is rare even by the prime minister’s penchant for cabinet experimentation, no reason was given for this managerial duopoly. It is not too arduous however, to surmise the most likely reasons.
Faraz is one of only a few members of the ruling party not given to come out swinging against any criticism of the government coming its way. Soft-spoken, one of the saner voices in governing ranks and respected by even opposition benches, he would have a two-fold task.
Whether the changes at the helm in the information ministry will deliver the desired results remains to be seen but what will likely not change is the fact that the more things change in Pakistan, the more they remain the same.
Adnan Rehmat
The first would be to urgently mend the government’s frayed ties with a media battered and bruised into an existential crisis by the ruling party’s policy of intimidation and coercion.
This is evinced in the controversial arrest of the owner of the country’s largest media group critical of the government, slapping of legal cases under a cybercrime law against several journalists, slashing by a hefty margin the share of lifeline public sector advertising to media which has resulted in over 5,000 media practitioners losing their jobs in two years and repeated attempts to expand coercive regulations of the internet that has thrown the media, rights activists and civil society up in arms.
The result: the media has turned a fierce critic of Khan and is simply not interested in his more-style-than-substance development agenda. This has translated into a steady erosion in the public standing and perception of both the prime minister and his party as solutions to prevalent socio-economic problems.
The second key task would be to soften the aggressive – but unproductive – soundbite against opposition parties in the context of accountability, a pet project of the premier that has resulted only in exclusionary and polarized politics with diminishing returns for his government.
The controversial accountability project may have yielded the desired results of short-term marginalization of Khan’s political foes, but the overreach in demonization of the opposition has resulted in diminishing political consensus for legislative agendas without which the Khan government simply can’t move forward now. Making matters worse is the withering public appeal of an accountability drive that has yielded few convictions and allowed the opposition to reclaim relative popularity for surviving a perceived witch-hunt.
Those are Faraz’ tasks but what is Bajwa’s brief? The former general authored reinvention of the powerful military’s public relations office, the ISPR, into a technically slick enterprise that is now a most powerful ‘media’ enterprise of its own. Other than making sure the army chief’s voice is heard above the din of Pakistan’s cacophonous politics, it often sets the news agenda of the national security narrative.
Skilled in information warfare, Bajwa, who is also head of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $50 billion investment program, is expected to serve a two-fold task. The first is to lead a narrative around CPEC to improve business sentiment for domestic audiences because the military is frustrated with the government’s incompetence in portraying Pakistan as business friendly.
The second is more strategic – becoming the lynchpin of Pakistan’s public relations diplomacy vis a vis India, Afghanistan and China. This is because the ISPR has been doing the heavy lifting on foreign policy issues due to the government’s sheer inability to be taken seriously.
Whether the changes at the helm in the information ministry will deliver the desired results remains to be seen but what will likely not change is the fact that the more things change in Pakistan, the more they remain the same.
– Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
