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IT’S Imran time in Islamabad. Again. Twice a year it’s happened this year, May 11, Aug 15, and nobody really believes it’ll be third time lucky — so what’s the hype all about?
Part of the answer: location. You want to bring down a government, you got to bring out people in Islamabad. Lahore is electric, Karachi intriguing, but it’s Isloo that matters in the surgical government toppling stakes.
Then there’s the memory of Aug 30 and Sept 1, the night and day the government teetered on the brink and only survived because Raheel chose not to pull the plug. Lesson from Aug 30, Sept 1: violence on Constitution Avenue isn’t like violence elsewhere, it can really shake things up.
And yet. And yet, throw in location, lesson, other stuff, throw all of it together and it still doesn’t amount to Imran getting any closer to this real goal, a two-stepper of exit Nawaz, enter, somehow, Imran.
Anything is possible here, but some things are less likely than others. So what’s most likely to happen today is:
– a large crowd will heed Imran’s call and turn up in the heart of Islamabad, possibly even a record-breaking crowd;
– Imran will have to offer the assembled crowd something new, so he’ll pull some kind of Imran-esque quasi-rabbit out of his hat, a crazy new scheme or grand new pronouncement in the mould of the abortive civil disobedience programme or stuck-in-limbo resignations from parliament;
– there may be a few moments of drama, with Imran suggesting the crowd may head into forbidden territory;
– nothing will happen; the crowd will go home; TV will natter on about historicity and meaning for a few days;
– the PTI protests will chug along, the government will limp along, everyone else will be left to wonder when it will all end.
The PTI is hostage to its leader’s ambition; the PML-N is hostage to its leadership’s fears.
The problem for Khan is obvious: the size of the crowd alone doesn’t determine the scale of the threat to the government. The most likely thing a big crowd, a huge crowd, even a record-breaking (for Isloo) crowd, would achieve is to temporarily re-energise the now desultory anti-government protests.
Because energy the PTI and Khan may have, but where are they going to go with it? Rewind to Aug 30/Sept 1. What pitched a tense situation into an alarming, violent one was the PAT, the Qadri goons. PTI may have joined in, PTI may have had enthusiasm, PTI may have caused some damage; but PTI were accomplices, not leaders.
Today, PTI will turn up in Islamabad alone. And, for all the verbal aggression that the PTI loves to flaunt, it doesn’t really have a cadre of loyal hooligans who’ll go into battle for their leader. In short, PTI doesn’t have a Gullu Butt brigade. Without PAT, the PTI is all bark and no bite. Bite means danger, risk. Bark means drama, histrionics. This place is used to digesting histrionics.
But then, why is the PML-N so obsessed with the PTI? Because as long as Imran is out there, running around, trying something, everything, probing, testing, sneering, railing, the PML-N senses danger.
Flip it around. If the goal was to hobble the government and steal its mandate, then it’s been mission accomplished for a while now. And yet Imran is still out there. Why is Imran still out there, the PML-N hawks are asking.
Could there then be a bigger goal, the one most outside the PML-N have now dismissed: the ouster of the government itself? The hawks are sure of it. They don’t believe the goal was to hobble; they believe decapitation was, is and will remain the goal. The goalposts haven’t shifted, the field has been lengthened, ie it’s a longer-term strategy than the smash-and-grab job it had looked like once.
From the outside looking in, you can see the problem: the PTI is hostage to its leader’s ambition; the PML-N is hostage to its leadership’s fears.
Imran wants to be PM, but he doesn’t know how to get Nawaz. But if success is elusive, defeat is guaranteed — if Imran stops. So Imran will try whatever, hype everything, promise anything, miss nothing — because, well, never say never.
A year ago, nobody would have thought August would have been possible. A decade ago, nobody would have thought the PTI would be fighting it out with the big boys one day. Heck, two decades ago, nobody thought the PTI could have existed.
The only way you lose is if you stop playing the game — and Khan seems to believe the obviously untrue. Hope has met reality many a time and in many a place before and rarely has it ended well for hope. But who’s going to tell Imran that?
Over in the N-League, fear has overcome reality. Like Imran’s hope, it’s not completely made up. If you were the victim, a thrice victim in the toxic world of politics here, would you really believe knee-capping was the extent of the plan and not decapitation?
So, what others may call obsession, the PML-N thinks is focus. If they had not reacted so furiously and focused so ferociously, the enemy would have won by now, the N-League believes. Survival, for the PML-N, is not a function of the enemy’s bad plan or poor execution; it is the N-League’s resolute defence that has got them this far.
And so, between the ambition of Imran and the fear of Nawaz, the rest of us continue to be trapped.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, November 30th , 2014
