If this was meant to be Imran Khan’s moment, it will have to wait. Looking back at this dharna politics of his, he will have a hard time distinguishing his own ostensible gains from the losses to a nascent democratic system.

The PTI made it clear to all and sundry its lack of maturity as a political party. This isn’t meant to suggest that the most mature political parties are the most successful but mature ones do avoid unnecessary damage to their image. The PTI’s lack of planning has been astounding. Often times it has looked like a collection of excitable naive adults gathered in a room who rely on gossiping kids for their information. Anchors like Mubasher Lucman are the new great public intellectuals in Naya Pakistan.

The list of mistakes doesn’t stop here. Strategy has been missing: at times in ways that have been criminally negligent or oblivious to the lives of party workers as well as law enforcement officials.

I will be the first to admit that Imran Khan has learned lessons along the way. Most noticeable has been the change of tone in his voice. Democracy will do that to you -- reforming you, like marriage, even when you want to continue acting like a spoiled child. But there was no coherent plan behind the whole exercise. To his supporters, a reformed Imran will look weak.

The problem with bravado is that if you don’t get the results you’re banking on you look quite silly. Of course, you can’t plan for incidents such as Javed Hashmi’s press conference but you can give greater intellectual direction, no matter how rotten the aim, to politics of agitation.

When the Azadi March and dharna began, a lot of people held their breath at various points asking themselves, "What has Imran thought as his next move?" The answer to this question is disappointingly predictable: not much. Even he didn’t know what he was thinking.

Also read: Deconstructing the marches 

Take the issue of resigning from National Assembly. He clearly failed to take his party’s members of National Assembly into confidence. When they didn’t oblige, he fired them and acted like the king that he accuses the prime minister of being. These were not members of a cricket team that Khan could fire at whim. These were elected politicians who had to answer to their constituents. Only because he didn’t get things his way, he divorced them. This was the height of arrogance but if you surround yourself with people who have often conveniently chosen to side with those wielding ‘pips’ rather than votes, you expect everyone to listen to you.

The moral of the story is this: every tussle in life is not the 1992 cricket World Cup.

In hindsight, the PTI and Imran Khan will realise that a shifting argument is akin to digging your grave in politics. It baffles me how the grievances about an election in some constituencies were then used to attack, out of frustration, an entire system and demand the PM’s resignation. Corruption, and systemic corruption, isn’t good enough reason to have mid-term elections.

If the PTI meant to challenge an entire system then it should have framed a broader argument from the beginning -- an argument that would include, as a first step, resignations en masse from all legislatures and a large rally in a major city. There it should have been announced that the party will march on the capital. Win or lose, that’s how you take on a system rather than whine about elections and later decide that you need to talk about a bigger problem. But this wasn’t about a bigger problem. This was about myopia and egotism.

If this was about corruption, the army should not have been painted as the saviour. A party that claims to talk about corruption without mentioning the military establishment’s time honoured questionable designs/actions is being both disingenuous and naive. It’s not flattering when the PTI politicians sound like children rehearsing rote learning about ‘civilian’ corruption. If no one else, Zia would be extremely proud of the PTI.

While the rest of the country was flooded, it was raining bad cricket analogies in Islamabad. Shocking though that while he kept harping on his cricketing prowess, Imran never looked for a ‘Javed Miandad’ in the PTI: a wily and fearless worker who wears the opponent down. Khan insisted on causing a pitch invasion all along to stop play since he wasn’t getting things his way.

Related story: Need better argument

He had an interest all along in raising the ante. His ‘cousin’ Dr. Qadri and he came together to push for one night of mayhem in Islamabad. Their tactics benefited no one and caused unnecessary injuries and lives. While police brutality must be condemned, no one should be naive enough to think that the protesters did nothing to incite violence. Attacks like the one on PTV headquarters do not occur without cause. Once you encourage violence for a cause, it creates its own agency. This is the reason those encouraging the throw of the first stone don’t have to actively manage the violence that ensues: it creates its own momentum.

Then there was the Hashmi moment: reminding the electorate in Pakistan of its powerlessness even though it has a vote. If ‘real’ decisions are made elsewhere and implemented by those wearing the garb of being legitimate political players, it will continue to betray the promises that Khan claims to stand for. Of course, Hashmi’s claims deserve investigation and proof. But he has enough credibility to make people believe that all were not being honest in the PTI camp. This too damages the PTI more than anyone else. The rest can use these alleged events for sympathy vote.

There are other grounds on which the PTI has failed miserably. If being a national level political party comes with a responsibility, and many would argue that it does, then the rhetoric insulting the police force while lauding the army insults the sacrifices of tens of thousands of men and women of the police force who have died protecting us. There was hardly any word from the PTI showing concern about the lives of police officials who suffered because of violence.

If the PTI’s politics is to ‘screw the system to save the system’ then it is on the right track. Otherwise, it needs to mend it’s ways before it takes everyone else down too. Pakistan has multiple problems: corruption is one but not the biggest. If you think it’s a problem bigger than civil-military imbalance, interference by military in political matters or extremism, you have wasted your time reading this. And I have wasted mine.