Looter and looted become one, as though the theft of political representation hides the visage of the subject, thereby rendering him anonymous. Legs in the air, legs on the ground, these roguish citizen-chairs make clumsy progress towards the street. Inverted, stacked, bobbing up and down rhythmically, the chairs hides the faces of the looters. But far from selfish, the very act of theft obscures, if not erases, the thieving self.
As though mocking the theatricality of politics, the looters cast their vote by appropriating the symbol of political representation, literally turning it on its head, and absconding with it for themselves. And yet it is this very basis that is looted out of the spatial and political confines of the grounds where the rally was held. The chairs at the rally were the material basis for the political theater on view-the audience. In other words, at Kasur the PTI’s supporters transform the leadership’s rhetoric about looting into an actual practice of it-they indeed behave like PTI’s opposition. But at the PTI Kasur rally (or any other rally), never is there any provocation to loot. Moreover, the irony of looting at a PTI rally is that the party has long characterized the establishment (specifically the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party) as “looting” the country through corruption. He never returned to his furnishings, material or symbolic. Days before his ousting, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto famously declared that his “seat” was strong and wasn’t going anywhere. Beyond material value, the figure of the chair lends itself to the familiar symbolism of political representation. That the object looted is a chair is significant for it is a symbol of political representation-it has symbolic value. Such useless-value suggests not a different, but a supplemental logic for understanding the significance of the loot. And while the looted chairs have use-value, it is also the case that there is footage (grainy though it is) of broken chairs-with damaged backs, and most perplexingly, with broken or missing legs. For these are the very affordances of the plastic chair that were exploited by the Kasur looters, who stacked, flipped, and transported them en masse. And this value can be multiplied by the very quality that makes plastic moulded chairs so cheap: light and stackable, plastic chairs can be transported and distributed with exceptional efficiency. His claim to benevolence, in fact, appropriates, defangs and ultimately domesticates unruly looting for the party’s ideology.īut why loot plastic chairs in the first place? The chair, no doubt, holds some exchange value. The 15,000 chairs, he seemed to suggest, were in fact PTI’s gift to the people of Kasur. Imran Khan used it as an occasion to showcase the impoverishment of the country. Some used it as an opportunity to criticize the PTI for not having enough chairs for their supporters, others saw it as symptomatic of the danger posed by PTI’s populism, and many hung their heads in embarrassment at the spectacle. Responses to the Kasur rally were predictable. Though at first only a handful of chairs were stolen by a few people, “at once the entire crowd started looting the chairs.” The reporter, who was at the scene, details what happened during the rally, what Imran Khan spoke about, and events after the onset of the looting. Instead, it was the humble plastic chair that took center stage.Īn ARY News anchor and reporter discuss the looting at Kasur. But other more valuable commodities were left alone: microphones, speakers, lighting, party-owned vehicles-none of them were touched. Some other items were also reportedly looted-a few carpets, some party flags, and some posters of Imran Khan. News footage depicts frantic, dusty scenes of looters stacking multiple chairs, flipping them over and carrying them upside-down above their heads while awkwardly running off into the streets. Not one or two chairs here or there, but all of them. As Imran Khan wrapped up his speech, the attendees began stealing the plastic chairs. The Kasur rally was exceptional not because of its size so much as how it concluded. Some reports put the number of chairs at 15,000. So large was the crowd that the PTI bought thousands of plastic chairs for the audience. In December of that year, for example, a rally in Kasur (a small town near Lahore and the border with India) saw 35,000 people attend. While the PTI dates back to the mid-1990s, the party’s mass appeal crystalized in 2011 when it held unprecedentedly large rallies across the country. The Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party came to power last summer in Pakistan’s general election.