Citadel of Lahore taken

Islamabad diary
This was a huge affair, to my mind bigger than Imran Khan’s path-breaking jalsa way back in Oct 2011. And was the crowd charged? You had to be there to feel the atmosphere, a pure Lahore crowd, swaying to the newest slogan to hit a land which has always been good at coining catchy slogans: ‘Go Nawaz Go’.
The dharnas have done at least this: they have popularised this slogan and given it an electric current. PM Nawaz Sharif felt its sting in New York, a sizeable crowd of Pakistanis raising this battle-cry outside as he delivered his lacklustre speech before the UN General Assembly. It has proved a source of embarrassment for Crown Prince Hamza – what have we done to deserve the likes of him? – at the Alhamra where ill-luck took him to address a tourism conference. And you should have been there to see the glee with which the crowd took to this chant at the Minar-e-Pakistan as a way of expressing its feelings.
Many in the punditocracy, tied to the rhythms of the past, are still not getting it. The Imran and Qadri movements have gone beyond rigging charges or demands for the elder Sharif to quit. They have captured a larger mood, a spirit of dissatisfaction with the way things happen in Pakistan. The dharnas haven’t created this mood – it was there already beneath the surface – but they have amplified its meaning, making people sit up and think, and galvanising hitherto politically-disengaged sections of the population.
Imran Khan has given everyone a lesson in the power of determination. Out of the seemingly impossible he has succeeded in creating what looks very much like a movement. When broad masses of people yearn for something – in our case, justice, a vision of progress, and a break with the past – and when someone holds aloft his arm and points out the way and is taken at his word, that amounts to a movement.
Just look at this: Imran just says that on such and such a day there will be a jalsa in Karachi and on this day in Lahore, and without canvassing of any sort, without loudspeakers blaring out the message, people of their own accord respond to the summons…this happens when you are riding a mood and people find it in their hearts to agree with what you are saying.
As for the Reverend Qadri, much as the chattering classes may find it difficult to stand him, he has given a lesson in political education to a nation-wide audience, a natural orator but still coming prepared with notes and citations for his daily TV harangues. Many in the commentariat made fun of him in the beginning but as he has proved his staying power, and his followers have shown their mettle – standing up to the Punjab Police and more than once giving it a taste of its own medicine – the sarcasm is noticeably thinner. True, a tribe of dedicated scribes are still to be seen shouting ‘conspiracy’ to explain the dharnas but they are taken less and less seriously.
The ISI stories too have died down. As the movements discover their strength, and Imran touches a popular chord, the possible involvement of the intelligence underworld in stirring the waters of discontent has become a secondary if not a forgotten story.
Some of the pro-Nawaz stories in the media are really funny, purveying the theory that with a change of guard at ISI and five key generals retiring, Sharif’s problems with the army would ease and the dark clouds lining the horizon would disappear. The changes have occurred but the PML-N government continues to look as bewildered and clueless as before.
Of all the wonders ISI may be able to perform conjuring up huge crowds at public meetings is not one of its fortes. General Zia, absolute ruler of Pakistan at the time, staged a referendum in Dec 1984 and it was such an embarrassment that when he appeared on television the same evening to thank the nation for reposing trust in him – Hosni Mubarak-style he got 96 or 97 percent of the largely fictional vote – he was seen wiping his nose three or four times with his handkerchief…this a sign of his nervousness. Even PTV’s friendly cameras could not hide the fact that he looked shaken.
It was much the same with Musharraf when he carried out his referendum in April 2002. It too turned into a joke, one serving general donning a turban above his uniform as he addressed a captive tribal audience in the Frontier and the Punjab governor, Lt-Gen Khalid Maqbool, shouting slogans at a jalsa at the Minar-e-Pakistan.
Field Marshal Ayub Khan was a spent political force in the autumn of 1968 and looked it. Bhutto had squandered much of his political capital by the fateful summer of 1977. Gen Zia seemed a figure out of touch with political reality when he dismissed his handpicked prime minister, Junejo, in May 1988. Gen Musharraf, seemingly secure in power, was unable to fathom the forces unleashed by the lawyers’ movement in March 2007.
This chronology is cited only to point out that the Sharifian political enterprise, although freshly voted into power just a year and a half ago, already looks tired and exhausted. Although still a mass party the PML-N for all the quickness it has been able to show during this time of crisis looks like a half-dead, lumbering elephant, as if in a daze. I may be completely mistaken but my feeling is that in what were the urban strongholds of the PML-N in central Punjab, including Lahore, the tide of popular opinion has turned. People are tired of the faces they have been seeing for the last 30 years, tired of the old rhetoric and not awed into silence by the development philosophy of glittering underpasses and flyovers.
It was just yesterday during the Zardari presidency that the Sharifs successfully presented themselves as the harbingers of a new Pakistan. On the strength of this perception they swept the 2013 elections in Punjab, charges of widespread rigging notwithstanding. This was a manipulation of reality, the Sharifs being the oldest product in the political market. But it worked, the PPP getting knocked out in Punjab, the PTI making solid gains and announcing its arrival on the political map but the PML-N carrying off the prize.
The last year and a half thus has been cruel for the PML-N. It has proved that the above was just a conjuring trick, the Sharifs instead of being able to take the nation out of its troubles still sticking to the tried-and-formula of passing off gimmickry and showmanship – one underpass here, one Azadi Chowk there – as hallmarks of governance. If no one had challenged them all would have been well. Vengeance, however, has come in the form of Imran and Qadri, who have held up the mirror to their empty performance. The success of the dharnas is that more and more people have seen through the deceit and the falsehoods.
As the old politics stands exposed the sentiment is growing that as a nation we stand at the cusp of another change in our political fortunes. Just as on the ashes of the Ayubian order arose the Bhutto phenomenon, and after that Gen Zia, and after him the fitful rebirth of democracy, everything about the present crisis suggests that yesterday is dying while something new is waiting to be born.
What happens next we don’t know – fresh elections or something else, it is hard to tell. But this much is clear: this lame-duck, stricken state of affairs cannot go on indefinitely. Pakistan is losing badly and governance is almost at a standstill. Unless we are afflicted with a death-wish, something will have to give. When the old order decayeth, something must take its place.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com