Asfandyar Wali leads one of the two major strands of Pakhtun politics in Pakistan. The other is led by Mahmood Khan Achakzai of the Pashtoontunkhwa Milli Awami Party. The two have their support bases in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Pakhtun belt in Balochistan, respectively.

Scion of perhaps the most notable Pakhtun political family, Asfandyar Wali inherited the politics of his grandfather Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and father Abdul Wali Khan, who both championed Pakhtun nationalism. His Awami National Party (ANP) is a successor to the National Awami Party (NAP) that was set up by Ghaffar Khan and other nationalist leaders in 1957. It later split into two factions: a pro-Moscow faction was headed by Wali Khan and a pro-Peking faction was led by Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani from East Pakistan.

Wali Khan emerged as a major opposition leader after the separation of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971. His party formed governments in coalition with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). His stature further rose when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s central government dissolved the Balochistan government and that of NWFP resigned in protest. The central government went on to ban NAP, charging it with committing anti-state violence in Balochistan with foreign support. Wali Khan and many other NAP leaders were sent to jail in Hyderabad where they were tried for high treason by a special tribunal. Asfandyar Wali was also imprisoned on the charge of assassinating Hayat Sherpao, a Pakhtun leader of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

After General Ziaul Haq took over power in a coup in 1977, he released the NAP leaders but they could not maintain their unity. As Baloch leaders formed their own parties, Wali Khan had no option but to set up a Pakhtun-only ANP. In the early 1990s, he resigned from public life, leaving Pakhtun nationalist poet Ajmal Khattak to lead the party, mostly working in alliance with Nawaz Sharif.

By the end of Khattak’s tenure, NWFP’s political landscape almost completely changed as numerous religious extremist outfits, including the Taliban, made inroads into the region. They not only directly affected but often also dictated the political course. When Asfandyar Wali became ANP’s head in 1999, parliamentary democracy and provincial autonomy sounded like alien concepts in Pakhtun lands.

Yet he managed to steer his party to power, in coalition with PPP, in 2008. His other achievement a couple of years later was to have NWFP renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the face of stiff, even violent, opposition.

His party’s rule, however, is often remembered as both inefficient and corrupt — a perception it has failed to shake off. In the 2013 election, it won only one National Assembly seat. Asfandyar Wali himself lost the poll from his home constituency in Charsadda district.

The party also suffered immensely in 2008-13 at the hands of the Taliban who assassinated many of its leaders and members not just in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but also in Karachi. Threats from militants, indeed, barred ANP from campaigning freely before the previous election. Asfandyar Wali retreated to highly guarded seclusion to save his life over the next five years.

Economic and demographic changes, too, have played a role in the party’s declining electoral fortunes. Pakhtuns are now spread all over Pakistan rather than concentrated in a single region. Resultantly, ANP’s defining ideology of a Pakhtun national homeland in Pakistan’s northwestern regions has outlived its purpose. With the recent merger of the tribal areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the party is being squeezed in a corner from many directions: the rise of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and the resurgence of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of religious parties, are depriving it of supporters in its strongholds, while its rallying cry of Pakhtun nationalism has been veritably snatched by the young leadership of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement.

It is in this environment that ANP is trying to retain its political space but does not seem to be doing a good job of it. Its election nominees have routinely opposed women voting in Upper Dir district (though it has fielded many women candidates in Karachi for the 2018 elections). One of its candidates is reported to have protected the leaders of a mob that killed Mashal Khan, a student in Mardan, over blasphemy charges, and in Karachi it is cutting seat adjustment deals with its arch rival Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan.

This is certainly not the way to restore a lost image and regain electoral importance.

The author is a professor of politics and history. He holds a PhD in social and political sciences from University of Cambridge

This was originally published in the July 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.