Said the pot to the kettle

The pot calling the kettle black. That’s how one can put popular politician Imran Khan’s criticism of the defence minister for using ‘foul’ language against his party (PTI) members on their return to parliament. Khan himself has the knack for giving a free rein to his tongue while criticising his opponents – perceived or real – lock, stock and barrel. All the same, he wants himself to be treated with utmost courtesy.
Any surprises? Hardly. Such inconsistency is a hallmark of our society by and large. We set high moral standards – only for others to follow and for ourselves to set aside when convenient. I’m committed to justice but only as long as the scales are tipped in my favour. While the heavens fall when someone rips me off, I deem nothing wrong in selling others a pup.
By the same token, my sense of honour knows no bounds when someone even tries to steal a look at the women in my family; but it disappears into thin air when I stare at others. And the self-styled saviour of the nation is no exception.
Khan is tarred with the same brush as the people he is taking on. Stripped of his slogans for the much needed political change, he is as much power hungry, as immense an opportunist, as great an autocrat in heart and mind, and as much willing to rock the boat of democracy if need be as any other politician – past or present.
Worse, the bedrock of his politics is hatred and intolerance – not of the existing order per se but of anyone and anything deemed to be obstructing his way to prime ministership.
That said, the defence minister should better have bitten his tongue. The PTI came back to parliament after having struck a deal with the government. So instead of being jeered at, they should have been welcomed by those sitting on the treasury benches.
Earlier, the ruling party, whether per force or as a token of magnanimity, had acceded to the PTI’s demand to set up a judicial commission to look into the allegations that the 2013 general elections were rigged massively and systematically. The prime minister will dissolve the National Assembly and call snap polls if the rigging charges are substantiated. The same gesture ought to have been given on the floor of the house as well. But the ruling party chose to go overboard. Perhaps the minister saw an opportunity to give Khan a taste of his own medicine – and he jumped at it.
At the same time, the PTI’s stance on resigning from the assemblies is open to criticism. If, as the party has argued, the assemblies, being an outcome of rigging, merit only dissolution, PTI legislators should not have returned once they had handed over their resignations to the speakers. The fact that they chose to grace parliament again lends credence to view that they never wanted to quit the assemblies. They were only hoodwinking the people.
Not only that, the return of his party members to the legislatures notwithstanding, Khan continues to call parliament illegitimate. It seems he will go on questioning the legitimacy of the assemblies as long as he does not call the shots there.
Article 64 of the constitution states in unequivocal terms that a member of parliament may resign by writing addressed to the National Assembly speaker or Senate chairman, as the case may be, and thereafter his seat shall become vacant. Besides, a legislator may be unseated in case he remains absent from the proceedings of the house for 40 days on the trot.
Not only had PTI lawmakers tendered their resignations, their absence from the assemblies overshot the maximum permissible period. But neither the government nor the PTI wanted the members having resigned to be unseated.
In addition to mincing no words while speaking his mind, Khan is also known for taking a U-turn from time to time. During the last six months, he has shifted his stance in a seesaw manner on at least three occasions.
First, in the wake of the carnage of students in a Peshawar school December last, he abandoned his pro-Taliban narrative, which hitherto had formed a key component of his politics.
The narrative had three keynote elements: One, the war on terror was not Pakistan’s own but that of the United States’. Two, with few exceptions (bad Taliban) the militants were essentially men of honour (good Taliban), who had taken up arms to protest the ‘anti-Islam’ policies of the US. And three, through negotiations the good militants could be won over.
On his part, Khan had subscribed to and popularised the narrative not on ideological but on popular, pragmatic grounds: with a view to winning the enormous rightwing vote bank, an endeavour that was partly rewarded.
But the children’s massacre made that narrative extremely unpopular – at least for a while. And with the army going all out against the militants, discretion necessitated that the narrative should be dumped. And as Khan did not wish to be on the wrong side of the establishment, he did so.
The Peshawar incident also provided him a way out to wind up his rather protracted sit-in (dharna) in the capital’s most sensitive area. He had earlier vowed that the sit-in would continue until Prime Minister Sharif called it quits for allegedly being part of the ‘grand conspiracy’ to manipulate the electoral outcome. But sensing that the protest movement was heading nowhere, except of course sapping the civilian dispensation of its strength, he made a virtue of necessity.
Then he declared that his party would continue to stay away from the federal and provincial legislatures until a judicial commission certified that the 2013 polls were not systematically rigged. But he was back in parliament even before the commission had seen the light of the day.
Now that the commission has been constituted, Khan has expressed full confidence in the body and promised to go along with its findings. Whether – making a break from the past – he will be as good as his word in the event that the commission’s findings run counter to what he is looking ahead to, is anybody’s guess.
The author is a graduate from a western European university. Email: hussainhzaidi@gmail.com