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TO put politics in Pakistan in perspective, one needs to view it through a telescope, preferably the Hubble telescope. Only then can one understand the significance of the current maelstrom between the PTI and the government in the universal scheme of things.
Over the years, scientists using the Hubble telescope have enlarged our comprehension of the universe, reminding us that we are but one planet in just one galaxy. They tell us there are millions of galaxies between us and the Ultra Deep Field (the farthest Hubble can peer into in outer space). This U-D Field lies 78 billion light years away from Earth. It contains over 10,000 galaxies, and each galaxy in turn accommodates million of stars.
It is conceivable therefore that a life form akin to ours must exist somewhere on another planet. Those life forms may well replicate ours, which forces us to admit the probability that out there, in the gaseous turbulence of the vast cosmos, there is another Imran Khan agitating against another Nawaz Sharif.
Elections depend, as voters know, not on the turnout at public rallies.
Whatever will be the result of the conflict between that duplicate pair, Hubble will reveal only millions of light years from now. For the moment, though, the outcome of the Imran Khan/Nawaz Sharif contest on Earth appears clear enough, even to the naked eye. Despite Imran Khan’s determined exertions to dislodge Nawaz Sharif from the prime ministership, he is having as little success as a dentist-intern might have extracting an unreachable molar.
No one doubts the purity of Imran Khan’s motives, nor his chaste integrity. No Pakistani advertises his patriotism with more fervour. Yet, one suspects he sees the prime ministership of our country as a remodelled World Cup which he can win and hold until the next electorate tournament.
Cricket matches, as every schoolchild knows, are won on a majority of runs scored. Elections depend, as every voter knows, not on the turnout at public rallies but on the turnout and votes cast in polling booths. It is not the heavyweights on a public platform that count; it is the MNAs and MPAs who matter when they stand up to be counted in their assemblies. Democracy may be a Joseph’s ‘coat of many colours’. It is not bespoke tailoring. That technicolour coat is meant to fit every Joseph equally.
Will Imran Khan succeed where Air Marshal Asghar Khan failed? Or will he too become another Don Quixote, tilting at windmills? Imran Khan cannot be dismissed so easily. He is not some fictional Spanish knight. He has become too powerful a presence in Pakistan’s politics, too formidable an opponent, and too adept at container-top chicanery to be relegated so lightly. He has an agenda, and the propellant drive to see it through. Whether he has the fortitude to wait as long as the Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi to claim the reward for his patience only time will tell.
Until then, saner democrats in Pakistan both inside his party and outside it wish that he would ventilate his grievances against a sitting prime minister in the forum from which that prime minister derives his authority — the National Assembly. For Imran Khan wilfully to discount today the National Assembly is for him to forfeit tomorrow the premium of constitutional authority that it offers to every legitimate government, including, in time, his.
Sensible democrats pray that all political parties will return to the National Assembly, to listen as much as to talk, to legislate as much as to debate, to answer as much as to accuse. Otherwise, they may find themselves as much an object of public ridicule as the prattle of retired parrots assembled recently in New Delhi by the Ananta Aspen Centre.
Fifteen former ambassadors/ high commissioners from both India and Pakistan were assembled under one roof to revivify Indo-Pak relations. Pakistan fielded six, from Dr Humayun Khan (ambassador 1984-88) to Salman Bashir (high commissioner 2012-14). Nine represented India, from K. Shankar Bajpai (ambassador 1978-80) to T.C.A. Raghavan (high commissioner 2013-15). Their cheerleader was the redoubtable Mr S.K. Lambah, once Tariq Aziz’s counterpart in the Indo-Pak secret channel and now chairman, Ananta Aspen Centre.
These 15 diplomats with an aggregate of seventy years of Indo-Pak experience between them sat and talked to each other, not at each other. Men who had spent their careers tightening the Gordian knot of Indo-Pak relations tried to untie it. Understandably, all they could agree upon was that both countries should ‘continue talks at all levels’. Winston Churchill said it with more flair: ‘To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war’.
Perhaps the governments of India and Pakistan and, at another level, Mian Nawaz Sharif and his inseparable partner Imran Khan should learn from the therapists Drs Masters and Johnson. They advocated ‘sensate focus’. It achieved wonders curing such cases of conjugal incompatibility.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2016
