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THE Karachi stock exchange recently soared to a record high of 40,000; the Indian police have detained a Pakistani pigeon for carrying a threatening message addressed to Narendra Modi; and Imran Khan has announced yet another boycott of parliament.
So business is pretty much as usual, then. Except you’d think that at a time when our neighbour seems to be going ballistic, threatening us with isolation, surgical strikes and the abrogation of the Indus Waters Treaty, Imran Khan might put off his protests for a while.
But no, he has promised to paralyse the Nawaz Sharif government after Muharram if the prime minister doesn’t do exactly as he says. After setting up camp briefly outside the Sharif family compound in Raiwind, he is now preparing his troops to besiege Islamabad once more.
Imran Khan’s disdain for parliament has long been apparent.
I can understand his demand for Nawaz Sharif to resign, even though information about his family’s properties in London has been commonly available for years. Perhaps earlier, Imran Khan thought this was no big deal, given the fact that he, too, owned a flat in London through an offshore company registered in Panama.
But to boycott parliament because he refuses to accept Nawaz Sharif as the legitimate prime minister is to refuse to represent the hundreds of thousands who voted for his party, the PTI. After all, parliament is an ideal platform to criticise the government, if that’s what Imran Khan wants to do.
But to endlessly destabilise an elected government is to undermine our fragile democracy. And this ceaseless agitation sends out a terrible signal at a particularly dangerous time. Surely Imran Khan could put his personal ambition to one side for the sake of national unity until the current tension on our borders subsides.
His contempt for parliament has long been apparent. For months, he and his party sat outside it during their dharna in 2014. And now he has declared that attending it is ‘pointless’. However, he and his National Assembly members have no compunction about drawing their salaries and perks. Surely the honourable thing would be to pay back the money they have taken for the sessions they did not attend, and resign their seats.
In such a scenario, there would be by-elections, and voters in the constituencies PTI members represent would get the opportunity to elect new members who would do the job they are paid for. And frankly, the heavens would not fall if this were to happen because unfortunately for Imran Khan, other opposition parties don’t share his views about parliament.
In one sense, I can see why Khan feels the way he does. After all, drawing large crowds to his rallies must gratify his ego a lot more than waiting for the speaker to permit him to have his say in the National Assembly where certain rules are observed. Here, he can’t abuse his opponents, or threaten them with unending protests and sit-ins.
Also, Khan probably feels constrained by the checks and balances built into our Constitution. Both as cricket captain and as the leader of a political party, he has brooked no dissent. Authoritarian leaders have little time for the give and take and compromise that are the lifeblood of democracy.
One reason he questions parliament’s legitimacy is his conviction that it is the product of rigged elections. In this view, he has been consistent. However, he forgets that after the 2002 elections, his party’s parliamentary presence was limited to his own seat. Now, the PTI has 28 seats, and has a plurality in the KP Assembly, making it possible for the party to form a coalition government.
So if the system is as rigged as he claims, why did it allow the PTI to win as many seats as it did? Of course we all know there is an element of pro-government bias built into the electoral system. This, combined with local muscle and money, does skew the result to some extent. But local and international observers concur that overall, the results of the last election reflected the popular will.
Clearly, this is a flawed process, but expecting completely clean elections is a pipe dream in a country with an incompetent, pliable bureaucracy. I could devote several columns to the weaknesses in the system, but they are all too well known to bear repetition here.
So it appears that Imran Khan will only accept those results that place him in Prime Minister House. But his nemesis, Nawaz Sharif, is barring the gate, and until he goes, he will just have to wait. But patience does not seem to be in his DNA. He wants it all, and he wants it now.
Apart from patience, another prerequisite of democracy is tolerance, and this is another quality Khan lacks. According to those who know him, he is convinced that only he is right. In a national leader, this is a dangerous trait.
Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2016
