Bizarre, desperate ploy

As these lines are being written, the National Assembly (NA) is meeting to take up the no-confidence motion of the opposition against Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan. The outcome is still a few days away, so we will have to wait and see what happens. All that can be said at this point is that the numbers game seems to have tilted, perhaps irrevocably, against Imran Khan.

On the eve of the NA session, Imran Khan’s ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government held a rally as a show of strength in the Parade Ground, Islamabad. The government had boasted this would be a million-strong rally. However, the estimates from various sources put it at thousands, but certainly short of 100,000. Nevertheless, it seemed an impressive show, with the PTI supporters full of noisy enthusiasm.

What was not clear is what the PTI hoped to gain from this show in terms of the no-confidence motion battle inside the NA. The answer was provided by none other than Imran Khan himself in his 106-minute harangue. What he said, however, seemed bizarre and reflected signs of desperation. Imran Khan ascribed his current set of problems, including the possibility of having to leave office, to an ‘international conspiracy’ to oust him because of his ‘independent foreign policy’.

As ‘proof’, he waved a piece of paper at the rally, claiming it could not be shared publicly as that would not be in the country’s interest. However, he offered to share it with the media off the record and to finally reveal its authorship and contents at the appropriate time. Not content to leave it at that, he once again threatened the PTI dissident MNAs if they voted against his government, claiming in the same breath that the dissidents would return to the party fold once they learnt the contents of the letter he tantalisingly waved at the rally. Perhaps predictably, he then went on to claim that the conspiracy against his government involved foreign funding to wean PTI loyalists and coalition allies away. Not one to waste any opportunity to insult his opponents publicly, Imran Khan repeated his disrespectful description of the opposition leadership as ‘three stooges’ and ‘three rats’.

Bizarre as all this sounds, the best was yet to come. Imran Khan likened his troubles to the fate Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suffered because of his independent foreign policy. He castigated the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in general, and its chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in particular, for joining hands with Bhutto’s murderers. Amongst the latter he included Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and said Bilawal should be ashamed at becoming a pawn in this game of foreign funded unity with the murderers of his maternal grandfather. Bizarre, inaccurate and desperate as this line of reasoning sounds, it is not unfamiliar. Every government in trouble in our history has claimed a role against it by the ubiquitous ‘foreign hand’. It is the resort to playing the nationalist/patriotic card, although it has shown little success in the past, and is unlikely to have much to show now or in the future.

Inevitably and predictably, the opposition, particularly the PPP, lambasted Imran Khan for daring to even bring the name of Bhutto on his ‘crass tongue’, let alone comparing himself with the late leader. They painted Imran Khan’s speech as a ‘farewell address’ and a clear indication that the incumbent PM would be prepared to let the country burn to save his skin. Their last word on the speech though was that it was the rantings of an ‘unhinged mind’ and certainly bizarre, even tragi-comic.

If the PM’s speech is analysed objectively, what it suggests between the lines is that Imran Khan knows the game is up and is preparing for what is to come after he is ousted through the no-confidence motion. He has threateningly said from time to time that he will be even more dangerous for his opponents out of power than he has been while in office. The opposition may feel on the other hand that they have braved the worst at Imran Khan’s hands over the last three and a half years. Street power may not quite work for Imran Khan this time round as it did in earlier years, particularly his extended dharna (sit-in) in Islamabad after the 2013 general elections that brought Nawaz Sharif back to power. The missing ingredient now is the backing of the establishment, which had plumped for building up Imran Khan and the PTI from 2011 onwards and finally bringing him to power through the controversial 2018 general elections. But in his case as is the case of most of our civilian elected governments, bringing favourites to power has never really worked out according to the establishment’s wishes or plans. On the contrary, each time the dynamics of power have brought the civilian incumbent up against the establishment on one issue or the other, leading to the departure of that particular civilian setup. No civilian PM since 1988 (after General Ziaul Haq departed this vale of tears) has completed his/her full term. Even when a party’s government has managed a full term, the PM has been changed by the powers that be (Yousaf Raza Gilani in the 2008-2013 PPP government, Nawaz Sharif in the 2013-2018 PML-N government, both ousted by the Supreme Court).

One can only hope and pray for the sake of our stumbling system and the country that the current ‘hands off’ wisdom seemingly permeating the establishment’s thinking becomes a permanent norm, since the track record of its manipulations speaks for itself. There is no alternative gentlemen to letting the political process play out if Pakistan is to at last achieve the goal of a normally functioning democracy, albeit an elitist one at this stage of our troubled history.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2022