EDITORIAL: It’s that time of the electoral cycle, just when feverish campaigning for the next election is about to take off, when perception sometimes matters even more than reality. And since surveys to read the pulse of the people are not very common in this country, the ones that are carried out ought to be taken that much more seriously by sitting governments. That’s why the ruling party’s reaction to findings of a recent survey carried out this month by Paris-based market research and consulting firm Ipsos, which says 87 percent of Pakistanis are not happy with the direction the country is headed in, is disappointing to say the least. True to script, PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) spokespersons have spent much of the last few days disputing this claim and trying to point out that conditions in times of previous administrations were even worse.
It’s no surprise that a good 43 percent of respondents identified inflation as the numero uno problem for the time being, up 17 percent from just September 2021. Even the most diehard PTI followers cannot deny that this has been a problem right from the beginning of its tenure. First, the government blamed its predecessors for everything that was going wrong; inflation being no exception. Then, when too much time passed to still blame previous administrations, they put the spotlight on special interest groups which the prime minister called “mafias”. And only after the pandemic, when the post-lockdown opening up triggered feverish aggregate demand across the world and drove up commodity prices in the international market, were they able to hide behind global price trends.
Yet if PTI leaders paid attention to the fine print of the survey report, instead of looking to rubbish it out of reflex action, they’d see that not many participants were too worried about things like the deteriorating exchange rate or the reasons for it, even though it is intimately tied to imported inflation, because the majority in any expansive survey would be common folk whose worries extend to and end with the price list on the market shelf, not intricate details like the rupee-dollar parity or the tax-to-GDP ratio. That explains why rising prices and shrinking wages and job opportunities are identified as the biggest problems. Since the people whose lives are severely compromised because of such issues also form the largest chunk of the voting public, their perception ought to be right at the top of the government’s priority list. And the government’s habit of throwing a fit and going on a blaming spree every time someone mentions a problem for which it is responsible is now making people lose faith in it.
The fact is that when the dust from the pandemic started to settle people found their jobs gone or wages reduced, while cost of living had increased many times over, with the government refusing to take any responsibility at all for any of it. You can’t, after all, expect the people to vote your promise of change to power then treat them to more of the same, even worse in some instances, and also expect them to sleep happy on empty stomachs just because you think it’s all someone else’s fault.
Rather than spread doubts about surveys like their lives depended on it, ruling parties should carry out extensive feedback-gathering initiatives of their own. That would give them valuable information about how people feel about their policies and such data-driven approaches can make all the difference in terms of targeted service and relief delivery.
PTI should take the Ipsos survey as the proverbial writing on the wall and also understand that playing down such things amounts to rubbing salt into people’s wounds in times like the present. Nobody feels the ruling party is deliberately employing policies that are hurting the economy and the common man. But there is definitely a need for PTI to communicate its strategies better and sympathise more effectively with the masses.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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