PTI's manifesto reads like a new constitution in waiting

Why a manifesto still matters, even in Pakistan’s politics

This is the first episode of Dil ki Baat, recorded four days before Pakistan’s 2024 general election. Muzamil opens by naming the premise directly: he is not telling anyone who to vote for. He wants to look at what each major party has actually proposed, because whichever government forms will set policies that reach into everyone’s salary, job, and daily life.

He addresses the usual dismissal head-on. People say manifestos don’t matter because whoever wins does what they want anyway. Muzamil disagrees with the framing, not the cynicism. “Even if what’s written in the manifesto doesn’t happen, you at least get a picture of what the party’s leadership actually wants, what their real needs and priorities are,” he says. Over three episodes he plans to walk through PTI’s manifesto, then the Pakistan Peoples Party’s, then PML-N’s. This one is PTI’s: 170 pages, which Muzamil says he read in full.

Rule of law as the foundation for everything else

The first thing Muzamil flags is how much space PTI gives to overhauling the justice system: judicial independence, family courts, rural arbitration mechanisms meant to divert cases away from overloaded courts, and detailed sections on women’s and minors’ rights covering harassment, inheritance, and education. He connects this to economics directly. “When you fix the justice system, investment and the economy follow. Investors won’t put money into a country where, if fraud happens, they have no court to go to,” he says, contrasting Pakistan with Dubai, where a fraud complaint can reach a courtroom within days.

He also credits the manifesto for naming gig and home-based workers, including delivery riders, as a protected category needing rights and legal cover. Muzamil reads this section as personal for PTI: a party writing down, in detail, the exact abuses of police, judiciary, and bureaucracy it says it experienced, then building a fix around that specific experience rather than issuing a generic promise.

A truth and reconciliation process for seventy years of history

One of the more unusual sections proposes committees to investigate and publish the record on Pakistan’s major historical ruptures, from the loss of East Pakistan to periods of martial law. Muzamil reads the tone carefully. Despite what he describes as a genuinely difficult period for the party, he doesn’t hear vengeance in the language. “They’re not so focused on revenge as they are on getting the whole truth out in the open, so the country never has to go back through it again,” he says. Whether that framing survives contact with actual politics, he leaves open.

A directly elected prime minister and a rewritten Senate

This is where Muzamil says the manifesto turns genuinely structural. PTI proposes a directly elected prime minister rather than one chosen by parliament, an argument framed around insulating the office from being “blackmailed.” It proposes that half of Senate seats be directly elected rather than chosen by provincial assemblies, with four-year terms. And it lays out, in more operational detail than he has seen from any party before, how power would devolve to district and tehsil-level local governments, stripping deputy commissioners and assistant commissioners of executive authority and handing it to elected local officials, with bureaucrats kept on only in an advisory capacity.

Muzamil calls this the part most people will find boring and most people should read anyway. Taken together, the changes amount to a new constitutional settlement even though the document never uses that phrase. He notes the practical obstacle: constitutional change needs a two-thirds majority PTI is unlikely to have, and Pakistan’s bureaucracy has no interest in giving up the authority this would take from it.

Abolishing CSS and paying bureaucrats to perform

The bureaucratic reform section is where Muzamil sees the sharpest break from precedent. PTI proposes ending the Central Superior Services exam system entirely, replacing generalist recruitment with specialist hiring, “the way the rest of the world does it,” and stripping remaining officers of perks, official vehicles, and staff in exchange for market-comparable cash salaries. Promotions and raises would be tied to measured performance rather than blanket annual increments, with the manifesto citing up to a 200 percent gap between top and average performers.

Muzamil calls the underlying logic appealing in principle, while flagging that principle and implementation are different things once the plan meets an entrenched bureaucracy built around exactly the privileges being removed.

Ownership versus management: the public-private partnership bet

On the economy, Muzamil highlights what he sees as the manifesto’s real dividing line against the other parties he plans to cover: PTI leans on public-private partnership rather than privatization. State-owned enterprises stay owned by the state, but management and a majority operating stake go to private companies, similar to the PTCL model, with profit split by ownership share. “The problem in this whole situation isn’t that government owns an institution. The problem is that government manages it,” Muzamil says, summarizing PTI’s position.

He also notes what’s missing: no short-term populist promises, ten-year targets instead of immediate relief, a firm commitment to end tax amnesty schemes going forward, and a section on pension reform that he flags as underdiscussed given that pensions consume close to a third of the federal budget.

The energy math no five-year plan escapes

Energy gets its own section, and Muzamil uses his own utility bills to illustrate the scale of the problem. “The electricity I use in Dubai costs me 28 rupees a unit. That same electricity is costing nearly 65 rupees a unit in Islamabad right now. That doesn’t make sense,” he says, walking through how expensive power feeds directly into uncompetitive exports, and how subsidizing it just shifts the cost into circular debt while removing the subsidy suppresses demand and hits producers from the other side. He credits PTI, like the other parties, with acknowledging the problem in detail, while noting none of them, in his read so far, has a clean way out of it.

He is more skeptical of the manifesto’s IT export target of 30 billion dollars within five years, calling it a number without a credible path attached, and voices doubt about a renewed push into housing and real estate given what he sees as an already oversized property bubble crowding out savings and investment.

A document written for a party that isn’t expecting to win

Muzamil closes on the manifesto’s texture rather than its content. Unlike the polished, professionally designed documents from the other parties, PTI’s reads as hastily assembled: inconsistent formatting, sections that look like they were written separately by different former ministers and stapled together. He reads that roughness as evidence the document is not cosmetic, that a party without normal access to design resources chose depth over presentation.

That depth, paired with the total absence of short-term populist promises, leads him to a specific conclusion. “I don’t think PTI is coming to power. I think this manifesto is also an acknowledgment that they aren’t forming the next government, and they’re preparing themselves for the Pakistan of twelve to twenty-four months from now,” he says. Structural reforms of this scope, he argues, only make sense as a document written for a different political moment than the one the country is in on election week, which is why he reads it as a positioning paper for a later fight rather than a governing plan for the next five years.