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THERE are as many ways to skin a goat as there are to remove a political leader.
Fifty years ago, in October 1964, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, then on holiday in a seaside resort in Georgia, was summoned back to Moscow by his colleagues in the Soviet presidium. His once fawning subordinates charge-sheeted him, accusing him of “ignoring other’s opinions”, even of taking decisions “over lunch”. Khrushchev appealed to their friendship. “You have no friends here,” one of them retorted. When Khrushchev tried to salvage his sinking authority by admitting his mistakes, another shouted him down: “You listen to us for a change.”
Khrushchev had been in power for 11 years, the same span of time that another leader Mrs (later Lady) Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister. In November 1990, well into her third term, her leadership was challenged by a fellow Conservative Michael Heseltine. The leadership was put to a vote. Twice, Mrs Thatcher failed to get the required majority. Tearfully, she bowed out, yielding the post to John Major. A political observer commented laconically of Heseltine’s betrayal: “At least he stabbed her in the front.”
Imran Khan’s frontal assault on a third-term prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, owes little to British traditions of furtive balloting in committee rooms, or to bloodbaths within the Kremlin’s mute walls. It owes even less to the mob politics that brought down the Russian czar in 1917, and the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. It owes nothing to parliamentary conventions that because elected leaders are voted in, they need to be voted out.
It’s been a while since our parties read their manifestos.
Imran Khan’s PTI party has opted for the party game ‘Numbers’: Who can mobilise the largest crowd? His detractors dismiss the tumultuous gatherings at Islamabad first, then Karachi, Lahore and recently at Mianwali, as the power of a rent-a-crowd: earnest, vociferous but electorally flaccid.
His party stalwarts see the increasing surge of attendees at his rallies as a barometer of the disaffection of the public with the Sharif style of governance, as a reactionary gravitation.
Neither is wrong. An angry mob is the grimace of a disaffected public, just as a friendly crowd to a politician is as heart-warming as a muddle of Labradors is to a pet-lover.
It is probably some time since anyone in Pakistan’s political parties opened a history book. They are advised to read Elizabeth Longford’s biography of the Duke of Wellington (1972). She describes how in October 1831 a horde attacked Apsley House (his London home), given to him by a grateful nation for defeating Napoleon. The demonstrators broke its windows. She mentions: “The glass was mended in time for the Waterloo Banquet of 1833, but the Duke retained the shutters and to the end of his life was apt to raise his hat ironically and point towards them if a crowd began cheering him.”
It is also some time since anyone in our political parties re-read their manifestos, released with such fanfare in 2013.
The PML-N, then aspiring to become the government, made sky-scraper promises that defied the laws of architecture and soared above credibility. On energy, for example, it promised “to tackle circular debt and system losses[,] to end load shedding in the minimum time”, and ‘to invest US$ 20 billion to generate 10,000 MW of electricity in the next 5 years”.
On education, it vowed to declare a ‘National Education Emergency’ and promised to work with the provinces to achieve “100% enrolment up to the middle level and 80pc universal literacy”. Understandably, it avoided any mention of poll-rigging.
Interestingly, the 2013 election manifesto of the Zardari-Bhutto PPP-P began with a quotation by its founder Z.A. Bhutto: “We badly need to gather our thoughts and clear our minds. We need a political ceasefire without conceding ideological territory.” One wonders whether his grandson Bilawal had those sentences in mind when he drafted his public apologia to PPP sympathisers, released a fortnight ago.
In that unprecedented nostra culpa, he admitted that his party had “committed mistakes in the past” and almost pleaded with discontented acolytes “not to support any undemocratic party that backs extremism”. He urged: “There are other ways for registering a protest. You should not punish Pakistan and democracy for our mistakes.”
No one outside Bilawal House can know whether he consulted anyone older before issuing that statement. His parents — in adversity and in power — always followed Benjamin Disraeli’s sage dictum: ‘Never complain and never explain.’
It is becoming clear to a disaffected public that Nawaz Sharif’s ineptness will prevent him from completing his third term. It is also clear that a tireless Imran Khan and a dispirited Tahirul Qadri cannot uproot Nawaz Sharif simply through noisy sit-ins.
Political liquidations may have the same ends; what distinguishes them from each other are the means.
The writer is an author and art historian.
Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2014
