London plan

London is city where Pakistani politicians have often met to devise strategies to bring down democratically elected governments. This is rather ironic given that London is the capital of a country seen as one where parliamentary democracy was born. According to a report in this newspaper, just as happened in 2014 before the PTI and PAT began their long-winded ‘dharna’ in Islamabad, PTI leaders are attempting to persuade Dr Tahirul Qadri to link up with them once again against the Sharifs and the PML-N government. For this purpose, we are told, three ‘leaders’, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, Jehangir Tareen and Chaudhry Sarwar, arrived in London to try and draw in Qadri who was expected to return to the UK capital very soon. The latest reports say that the PAT has apparently firmly refused to be a part of any such plan. The complication lies in the fact that the PAT does not trust the PTI because it believes the PTI used it when it needed to do so and then betrayed it. The PAT feels, correctly, that it was piggybacked in the 2014 dharna. It provided the numbers while the PTI stole the limelight during the four-month standoff that crippled Pakistan’s political life. Another irony in the affair is that Imran Khan, not very long ago, had refused to make an effort to bring Qadri round. He had repeatedly and gleefully insulted Tahirul Qadri for not coming knocking at his door. But we are now fairly used to such changes in his principled stances. In the eyes of Dr Qadri, the worst aspect of the betrayal was the millions of rupees granted by the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the provincial budget to a madressah run by hard-line cleric Maulana Samiul Haq. Imran Khan has justified this bizarre allocation in the past by insisting such funds could help modernise and regulate seminaries. The PAT has stated it opposes extremism and is reluctant to enter into any deal with a party whose leaders have sided with its ‘enemies’ while at the same time hurling rather unpleasant slurs at Dr Qadri himself. It seems Imran’s ability to say whatever comes first to his mind has him in deeper trouble that he expected with the PAT head and his followers.

Still, whether Qadri’s ‘no’ to Imran Khan is permanent or subject to change is not an entirely clear matter, for now. Tahirul Qadri – a man as unpredictable as Imran – cannot be seen as a champion of some new moral vision in the game of dirty old politics. His personal, political and ‘social’ history is in itself a case study of how ‘charismatic’ charlatans birthed and nurtured by a stagnant and conservative social and political order tend to develop dangerous ambitions and designs that can only serve to distort the possibility and potential for true change. Few doubt that in 2014 London had figured prominently in the preparations for an attempt to bring down an elected government. Even fewer should doubt that plots and behind the scene dramas – whether those made and performed by the Sharirfs and others in the past or those that may be in the offing now – have done nothing to improve the state of affairs in this country. With Pakistan facing continued aggression and diplomatic challenges from a hostile India, surely the political class should recognise this is not the time to come together rather than to pull each other down. Certainly, this is an odd time for plots to be hatched.