Best of three

Side-effect
Badminton is both an entertaining and a beneficial game to play. I am told it is more intensive than tennis among racquet sports, makes you sweat like a prohibited animal, burns your fats, consumes your unspent calories and finds and stretches those muscles in the body which got dissolved soon after your teens if you are not an athlete and stopped indulging in any physical sport after school or college years.
Some history buffs will find it interesting to know that the game was developed in the nineteenth century in British India by army men. Even more fascinating is the fact that the first attempt to set rules of the game was made in our good old Karachi in 1877.
The game was played in Pakistani politics before. What we witness now is the game of badminton being played in our politics again, with slightly different rules though by men who are elderly or middle aged. We can change the rules according to our needs as even the first set of rules was developed in one of our own cities. The players keep changing the shuttlecocks as well while people watch avidly. The shuttlecocks are named ‘Revolution’, ‘Change’, ‘Corruption’, ‘Bad Governance’, ‘Election-rigging’, ‘Loadshedding’, etc.
In the first game, played between the container-team led by the Khan-Qadri duo and the parliamentary-team led by Mian Nawaz Sharif, it seems the latter has won. Whoever was the trainer and coach (read script-writers if you wish) could not get the Khan-Qadri team to win the first game. Not as many people gathered as was announced for the sit-ins in Islamabad. Leave alone a million people the two marchers – Khan and Qadri – had claimed to bring to the capital city the combined presence on the best of days seldom exceeded one hundred thousand.
For weeks, the strength in the two sit-ins has fluctuated between ten and twenty thousand at the maximum. There were days when fewer people were present. Both Khan and Qadri continued to appeal to people to join the sit-ins but the response was not as healthy as they had wished. Khan asked for civil disobedience and it was not found to be feasible even among his own ranks. Qadri asked people in the country to block major arteries between cities and that never happened.
Then there were defections in Khan’s ranks. The elected president of his party, Javed Hashmi, saw a conspiracy against democracy being hatched and accused his own party leader, chairman Khan, of being a part of it. It did not matter as much to the ardent supporters of Khan as they believe he can never be wrong but it did matter to those sitting on the fence besides providing succour to the enemy camp.
Earlier, there were torrential rains in Peshawar and many people were killed. The chief minister of KP, the PPP-turned-ANP-turned-QWP-turned-PTI leader, was making merry, dancing and enjoying himself at the sit-in. It did not sit well with some followers of Khan in the province.
Then there were rumours of Khan’s meetings in London with Qadri, our sit-in cleric who after claiming Canadian citizenship wants to bring revolution to Pakistan. The PTI continued to deny that for long – until the time the vice chairman, Qureshi, accepted that a meeting was held between the two. Ironically, other stalwarts in the party said that they did not know anything about any such meeting after Qureshi made that statement. Doesn’t that sound interesting, to say the least?
The two protesters joining hands is an interesting development otherwise too. Mazari, Khan’s information secretary, wrote a scathing piece against Qadri just a few months back. Qadri was deadly against the Taliban, on the one hand, and wanted Articles 62 and 63 of constitution to be followed in letter and spirit when choosing members of the assemblies on the other. Khan was not only supportive of the dialogue with Taliban, he was even named by them to negotiate with the government of Pakistan on their behalf. Khan is on record being critical of the two articles of the constitution as well as he thinks they are impractical and interfere with some private matters and personal morality of an individual.
Even now, Qadri supports the military operation in North Waziristan and Khan mostly chooses to stay silent on what is happening in Fata now. He was hugely critical of the drone strikes but is tongue-tied about the bombing now. Therefore, it is more than evident that some arbiters, brokers or negotiators brought the two together. Not Sheikh Rasheed, for God sake, if you are thinking of him while reading this. He is small fry in these matters now. As a side-note, Sheikh Rasheed reminds me of an English proverb. ‘To a worm in a horseradish, the whole universe is a horseradish.’
Lo and behold! Gen (r) Aslam Beg, another character in his own right, comes to the fore. He takes the talk of a script and a conspiracy behind the sit-ins one notch further and sees not only Pakistanis but also foreign powers, particularly Americans, behind the plot. Forty days of sit-ins has tired many people out and the first game of the match is over. Sharif rallied parliament in his support, pushed back the script-writers, whoever they were, and got 21 points to win the game.
To me and to some friends in Karachi whom I had a chance to get enlightened from, Khan’s political rally in Karachi last Sunday was the beginning of the second game of the match. Even if we say Karachi is a big city with a population of 18 million and more people were there in recently held Sirajul Haq-led JI rally or a regular MQM rally, it will be unfair on the PTI if we do not accept their success in mobilising a strong, impressive public meeting.
Khan, undoubtedly, enjoys more support in the urban middle class of Karachi than Sharif. The PTI decided to begin the next game of the match from Karachi. This game is about campaigning for the next elections. The forty-day uninterrupted coverage on media to Khan and Qadri is unprecedented and brings them to living rooms across the country on a daily basis.
It was already turning into an election campaign, even if the shortcomings of the two were also exposed, but the Karachi meeting is the formal beginning of the election campaign. It is not about rigging in the last elections any more. It is focusing more on slogans of change, public welfare, plummeting of prices of basic goods and utilities, etc.
The second game of the match is on. Sharif cannot be complacent even after winning the first game. He and his government have to respond and respond quickly to public demands of economic stability, increasing incomes, cutting prices, continuous power supply, etc.
Khan, who is cornered at the moment in Islamabad, will try to find new courts to play the game in Karachi, Multan and Lahore. To become the prime minister, he knows he needs the vote in Punjab and the affluent middle class opinion in Karachi to be on his side. Peshawar will never get him there. So Pakhtuns may not vote for him as much in the next elections but he will gain ground in Punjab if Sharif does not deliver.
Khan is in a hurry and Sharif takes his own sweet time to make simple decisions. He will not find those parties who sided with him in parliament during the first game perpetually siding with him. If Sharif wins the second game, he wins the match. The third game becomes redundant. If he loses, there will be a third game to decide the match. That may well be elections but since we can set our own rules for badminton in Pakistan, not just the shuttlecocks but the players may also change.
Tailpiece: My badminton analogy is inspired by Khan’s unending cricket analogies.
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com