Lucky Imran Khan!

Prime Minister Imran Khan should consider himself lucky that without doing much his government is under no serious threat except problem within and his allies.

He has failed on many fronts but succeeded in maintaining ‘civil-military’ relationships which his predecessors could not keep. He is also lucky that he got sharply divided Opposition in the last two years.

Whether his government accepts it or not but he has not come up to the expectations of his voters who still expect him to do few wonders in the next three years. He did everything which he didn’t believe and was against it.

He became the prime minister after 22 years of the PTI’s struggle when the two mainstream Opposition parties lost the confidence of the powerful quarters and faced numerous corruption charges. By the time elections were held in 2018, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was already disqualified by the Supreme Court while his other key Opposition rival and ex-PM, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a most unfortunate and tragic incident on December 27, 2007, a week before 2008 general elections.

The PPP was shattered and former president Asif Ali Zardari could not keep the party intact at the workers level beyond Sindh. But the PML-N despite Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification emerged as a strong party and was the leading party in Punjab while the PPP retained its Sindh slot.

But the two parties because of their distrust allowed space to the PTI and Imran Khan and could not pose any serious challenge in the last two years. The most embarrassing moment for the Opposition was defeat during the vote of no-confidence against Senate chairman despite their comfortable majority. It led to further trust deficit between the two. The Opposition also got themselves exposed during Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s big show in Islamabad and both the PPP and the PML-N backed out and only provided token support. If one person who gained from all this was ‘lucky Khan’.

The real challenge which Imran Khan faced was from within whether it is his policies, performance, bad governance or failure in appeasing the allies who were then allegedly handled by the ‘handlers’ otherwise the government would have collapsed much earlier. Thus, the option-less scenario made the prime minister the only option at the moment.

His government should get some benefit of doubt that due to the coronavirus pandemic it faced a daunting challenge of future economic meltdown and massive unemployment ahead. It was also unfortunate that the nation witnessed division between government and Opposition on issues like COVID-19. Only time will tell how successful was IK’s strategy of ‘smart lockdown’. But his Ehsaas Programme like Benazir Income Support Programme is a success story and in this deteriorating economic situation it did provide some relief to the masses.

On the other hand, prices of essentials are completely out of control like medicines, sugar, wheat and other day-to-day commodities. The alleged scam on all these three plus petroleum prices fiasco need independent investigation and mere publication of Sugar Commission report may not be enough if accused go scot free and prices continue to go up.

Imran Khan has come into power with lots of promises and people assumed that he had a formidable team to perform. He also raised hopes of the people when he claimed that his teams on all fronts had done their homework on ‘civil service reforms’, ‘economic reforms’, ‘police service reforms’ and on ‘across the board accountability’. But looking back to the performance since his party voted to power on July 25, 2018, it was not something he should be proud of. It’s quite disappointing which could be reflected from his warning to the ministers to improve their performance in the next six months.

He confronted strong ‘mafias’ but found some of them within his own rank and file and with weak government he could not do much but must be given credit to at least succeeded in exposing them by publishing sugar commission report. What is next would be interesting to follow.

His party the PTI was on a weaker wicket regarding ‘foreign funding case’ before the Election Commission but like any government managed to delay it and it is still pending. His government has little to celebrate even if the BRT project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is now completed as claimed by provincial minister Shaukat Yousafzai.

He did everything which he used to oppose prior to the 2018 elections from having ‘electables’ to the concept of annual developments funds for MNAs, which he always considered as biggest corruption. He joined hands with people like Chaudhrys of Gujrat, whom he always considered as ‘chor or daku’.

He now has one of the biggest cabinets comprising both elected and non-elected members with over one dozen advisers and special assistants. During 2014 ‘dharna’ he strongly opposed a huge cabinet.

It was his right to bring anyone as chief ministers in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but his own party leaders and MNAs, MPAs particularly from Punjab termed the move a disaster. PM Imran did everything to make Usman Buzdar a success story but as things stand today his policy has only strengthened the main Opposition party, the PML-N.

He still has strong grounds in KP, but much of the credit goes to Pervez Khattak by far the most successful chief minister of KP, in the last four decades. The party performed in 2018, when it got two third majority in itself a big achievement. But only Imran knows why he has dumped such a person and gave him a low-profile federal ministry of defence.

Prime Minister Imran Khan still has three years to perform and as his own federal minister Fawad Chaudhry said “we can’t go to the people with this kind of performance particularly in Punjab. Need to do more before it is too late”.

The writer is a senior columnist and analyst of Geo, The News and Jang.

Twitter: @MazharAbbasGEO