A big fuss. And a slug is: Fleeting moments

A big fuss

The battle lines between Imran Khan and Mian Nawaz Sharif were fully drawn. Khan vowed to lock down the capital until his adversary presented himself for accountability over his alleged corruption or resigned.

A million PTI workers were to storm the capital and besiege it. Then there was the thaw. Khan, instead of locking the capital, decided to celebrate a ‘thanksgiving day’. What was the brouhaha all about if after so much thunder Khan had to settle for what he had been offered months earlier?       

When Imran Khan ordered his party cadre all over the country to gather at Islamabad to seal the capital for an indefinite period, he didn’t realise the difficulties thousands of daily-wagers, traders and others who commuted back and forth to the city would face. Nor did he care about the thousands of students who would miss their classes, the patients who would be deprived of urgent medical care, or the doctors who tended to them couldn’t be on duty.

Mercifully, that stage never reached, mostly because Khan couldn’t manage enough troopers to seal the capital.         

Imran Khan seems to carry deep antipathy against the prime minister whom he considers his archrival. He has been protesting about one issue or another without any success. Whenever you put forward this kind of an argument, PTI sympathisers quickly retort, “Aren’t you against corruption?” Now Khan’s noble mission to rid the country of corruption is one thing, but disrupting the lives of ordinary people by never-ending protests is another matter.       

Not only Imran Khan, who has qualified himself to be an inveterate agitator, all other political leaders must also realise that their rallies and dharnas disrupt the routine lives of the taxpayers, law-abiding citizens, and the business community.

Moreover, counting heads in the rallies to prove party popularity is not the right index. A crowd gathered from all over the country doesn’t represent the country’s vote bank. If that were the case, religious parties whose followers sit like robots in the rallies would have dominated the political scene of the country.

The Jamaat Islami cadre is committed and disciplined but it never transforms into votes to elect its leaders to any remarkable representation in the assemblies. The JI is riding the PTI bandwagon only because it has had some cabinet stakes in the KPK government. Otherwise, JI chief Sirajul Haq is a solo flyer like Imran Khan.

The PTI chief’s role in the present scenario has been likened to the role that Air Marshal Asghar Khan played in the late seventies, and Donald Trump plays in the US today. Asghar Khan during the PNA movement had vowed to hang Zulfikar Bhutto on the Kohala bridge; Imran Khan has vowed to see Nawaz Sharif out of power and into jail for money laundering. The language Khan uses against the Sharifs is uncivil to say the least, which makes one wonder about his Aitchison and Oxford credentials.

Asghar Khan participated in the movement against Bhutto, launched on charges of rigging the election; Imran held a long dharna on similar charges but failed to accomplish anything. Asghar Khan didn’t consider anyone at par with him in honesty, uprightness and morality; neither does Imran Khan decades later. Asghar Khan wasn’t destined to taste power; instead, he remained under house arrest during Ziaul Haq’s dictatorial rule.

Zia considered Asghar Khan an incorrigible rabble-rouser and confined him to his house in Abbottabad. The overweening ambition for power that Asghar Khan manifested under the veneer of honesty and high morals in nineteen-seventies, Imran Khan follows him in true spirit in 2016.        

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.

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