EDITORIAL: Are we heading towards an early election? It would be unwise to utter the word ‘yes’ with any kind of certainty. But the question whether there’s any other explanation of national political atmospherics as they have come to obtain over the last one week or so has no easy answer. From day one the opposition has been of the mind-set that the last general election was rigged in order to hand national governance over to Imran Khan-led Tehreek-e-Insaf.
The opposition has come a long way from its drubbing in 2018 and now appears to stand united to get rid of the government by out-voting it in assemblies or by overwhelming it, if required, by locking down the Red Zone of Islamabad. On its part the government had been resisting the opposition’s moods and moves by offering the people lollypops of all kinds. But these lollypops were only lollypops and could not outweigh the day-to-day increasing burden of cost of living of common man.
Actually, people want a clear roadmap for their welfare. That the much ballyhooed ‘Naya Pakistan’ also remained nothing but an empty slogan is also a fact. Of course some of the price hike pinching the common man was unavoidable, but instead of justifying it as universal phenomenon the government kept blaming the previous governments for the wounds it had failed to heal. And its excessive reliance on the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to weed out opposition leadership from the national political scene also did not bear fruit. Even when its political allies kept promising their loyalty the government remained suspicious.
The government seems to have reached a fork in the road, which perhaps requires it to take the road to early election; and there are quite a few tell-tale signs of such thinking. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s recent address to the nation, which was strongly characterized by populist rhetoric, for example, is a strong case in point.
Also, as he was addressing an election-oriented public meeting in Mandi Bahuddin his ministers in Sindh were on election trail. Imran Khan now appears to be ready to cultivate closer contacts with leaderships of allied parties and take care of his erstwhile friends’ irritations.
Possibly, he is of the view that instead of losing in a National Assembly vote count, for which the opposition claims to have the required numbers, he should go for snap election as his party is apparently still in one piece while the opposition may not succeed in putting up unanimously selected candidates for next election. So it won’t be beyond the realms of possibility that the nation would be shortly hearing news of a snap election, an election that is announced suddenly and unexpectedly.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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