Time to accept some hard realities

Islamabad diary
At about five in the evening, a few bald patches in D Chowk still visible, I said that Imran Khan’s rally was not the overpowering thing it should have been. Barely an hour later I was eating my words. Stepping down from the TV perch from where we were pontificating, and making my way to Jinnah Avenue, I was dumb-founded. For a river of people was flowing towards the parade ground, the venue of the jalsa.
Feeling a bit shamefaced, I went up to the Geo office for a cup of tea, worn out as I was for I had been there since 12 in the afternoon. When I came down to Jinnah Avenue again…the river was in high flood, ceaseless and unstoppable. When I asked a few people what had taken them so long, they said JUI-F workers/maulvis (Maulana Fazlur Rehman) had blocked the roads and they had to wait for hours before they could move towards Islamabad.
Consider this: a JUI-F leader is slain in Larkana, Sindh, and the Maulana’s cohorts block roads in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And we are to believe that they were mourning the dead and not trying to sabotage the PTI rally. If PTI workers and sympathisers had been less fired up and determined they would have gone home and participation from KP would have been thin. Only the fact it was not a rent-a-crowd saved the day for them.
I can’t forget an old woman being helped along by her female relatives. I asked where they were coming from. Peshawar. When had they set out? 10 in the morning. And how old was the matriarch? 82. There was a young man on crutches hurrying towards the jalsa-gah.
The purpose is not to glorify the PTI, much less sing Imran Khan’s praises, but only to point out that this is a new phenomenon we are seeing. Imran Khan may have been around for a long time, struggling for the last 18 years, during which time a lesser man perhaps would have given up, but after these years in the wilderness, of not being taken seriously as a political figure, he has finally arrived. Like it or hate it, there is no escaping this reality.
The galvanising of the young and the not-so-young, of the middle class and the lower middle class, of whole sections of the people hitherto aloof from politics, the huge, unprecedented participation of women of all ages in PTI rallies, and the carnival atmosphere to be seen in those rallies…about this new spirit of engagement what the nay-sayers, and above all the ruling party, have to understand is that it is not going away anywhere any time soon. It is here to stay.
The PPP is dead and buried in its once-stronghold of Punjab. The PML-N is a product of times past, its sell-by date perhaps over. The PTI is the new enfant terrible to arrive on the national scene.
Those who think that Imran’s strength will ebb and the steam will go out of his balloon are fooling themselves. He has committed mistakes, even blunders – like his misplaced call for a civil disobedience movement. But these weaknesses pale beside his one undoubted achievement: the way he has stirred the stagnant waters of Pakistani politics and turned vague public frustration into a solid political movement. Excoriate him, pillory him, make fun of him…but you will have to be fooling yourself to insist, against all the evidence, a new thing at his hands has not come to exist.
The onus of recognition falls heaviest on the ruling party. The longer it takes for it to open its eyes to the new realities the more serious becomes its problem. If Nawaz Sharif thinks that Saad Rafiq’s histrionics or Pervaiz Rashid’s jibes – jumla-baazian – are a sufficient answer to Imran Khan he lives in his own world.
Imran Khan has no shortage of detractors but he has confounded them all. Since mid-August he has gone on from one thing to another: first the long march from Lahore, which wasn’t very impressive, then the prolonged sit-ins and the daily speeches from atop the container, high drama alternating with moments of farce, and the whole thing stretching out until it became a bore, testing the fortitude of his supporters and the patience of his listeners.
But just when it seemed he had run out of options he announced a series of meetings across the country, drawing mammoth crowds everywhere. Then out of the blue came the call for the Nov 30th show of force and, as I have said, until 5 in the evening I thought he had blown it, the jalsa not coming up to its high expectations.
I went so far as to tell Chaudhry Ghulam Hussain, the well-known TV host, and Nasim Zehra that we were watching a tragedy unfold, a movement which had attained its high point losing its momentum before our eyes. Then to my mounting disbelief the arena began filling up, as if reinforcements were coming from afar. If I do not overstate the case, would not Wellington have felt the same when Marshal Blucher’s Prussians arrived to his aid at Waterloo?
But the thing to note: even when it was all jam-packed, when a woman, a family, young girls, had to walk through, strutting young men would part, giving them the right of way. For young, smart-looking girls – some in jeans – to move thus freely without fear of molestation or touching in a Pakistani crowd is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t know what ‘naya Pakistan’ means but in this one circumstance it may already have come.
The PML-N strategy boils down to assuming that all this will pass and the ‘Kaptaan’ will be left with nothing but the echo of his own rhetoric. It is wrong, if only because it is not a flashing meteor across the skies that we are seeing, a blaze of light and then nothing. The PTI has already demonstrated staying power. Beyond that, having gone through its battle inoculation, it is now more confident of itself, a tried and tested force.
So anyone taking lightly Imran’s threat to up the ante and shut down major cities is probably making another mistake. If the JUI-F which doesn’t carry one-twentieth the PTI’s strength can block the roads and highways leading out of KP the ruling party will be deluding itself if it thinks that the PTI doesn’t have the muscle to block roads leading in and out of Lahore.
The crisis we already face thus becomes more acute. The stalemate deepens. Can any government function properly in such a situation? The negative TV ad campaign against the PTI already shows how much Imran Khan is on the nerves of the ruling family. Such tactics will get it nowhere. So shaking itself out of its stupor and mastering some of its prejudices, if it is to get anywhere it must think in broader terms.
Can it hold out some kind of an olive branch, some offer of talks? Only problem is that the role of peace-maker does not come easily to Nawaz Sharif. The related problem is that any acceptance of Imran Khan’s demands – election audit, etc – will be seen in the ruling family as akin to virtual political suicide.
This is not the stuff of tragedy – no need to dramatise it like that – but it does mean Pakistan at the mercy of egos that can’t rise above themselves. If there were no price to pay this could be viewed as spiced-up entertainment. Our history, however, points to more forbidding conclusions.
In 1977 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stretched out negotiations with the PNA so much that Gen Zia got his chance to intervene. Whatever may have been written in his stars, to some extent Bhutto invited his own doom…just as Pakistan’s ruling classes invited the wrath of the furies in 1971 when they refused a settlement with the Awami League.
A political settlement of the present crisis…the opportunity for this is slipping through the fingers of the ruling set-up. Can something be done or are we watching another drama unfold?
Email: winlust@yahoo.com