THE current season reconfirms just how painful it can be for some politicians to say goodbye to their parties and begin afresh under new banners and leaderships. They come up with the most moving parting notes to justify their shift, since the slightest of carelessness by the individual on the move can leave the mover with an irredeemable reputation.

This is a real tough one as the aspirant tries to balance rejecting the party with an expression of complete allegiance to another. The departure has to be somehow justified, but at the same time a statement of total loyalty has to be made in favour of the party that is to be joined next. OK, it is not so much about the new party but about the person who heads it.

The tradition of long paragraphs that accompany the transfer from one party to another is pretty much a part of pre-election rhetoric because this is when the pangs of conscience which stir party crossovers are at their strongest. It is as if some of them want their resignation letters to serve as real tear-jerkers considering the amount of emotion that goes into them. This is why someone once remarked that given the pathos of leaving a party, it is sometimes puzzling as to why a particular politician chose to leave in the first place. But you can say that the one who made this remark was not aware of the compulsions of Pakistani politics.

Politics here constantly moves between two extremes. For instance, it would be a happy jog for a patriot to be a follower and committed backer of a Pakistani politician who understands the value of regional peace. But then, how can the same backer stick to the same leader when one fine morning, while reading the newspaper, the leader is suddenly discovered to be a traitor selling his country to a hostile neighbour? He cannot and this is what necessitates a switchover to a current patriotic option, regardless of the fact that until recently this new patriot was branded a security threat. Lucky is the country whose citizens can still find a leader with faultless patriotic credentials, who has never been known as traitor. Lucky is Pakistan that it has an alternative to the tried and stigmatised lot otherwise known as the Asif Zardaris and Nawaz Sharifs of this blighted world.

There have been many who have shown a total lack of understanding of the art of leaving in the ongoing Pakistani season of political departures.

There are many sets of justifications available to an aspiring party hopper to choose from. There are, for example letters, written by learned individuals in which they go to great lengths to explain why they are parting ways and with whom. I once read a letter by a Democrat in the US which was almost an admission that the so-called left had absolutely no reason to be around in the world as it exists today. Obviously, divisions and the lack of them do not really apply to our own situation since our politics is not defined by any fine points of ideology and revolves around strictly the performance of some very basic functions of a government, such as building roads and hospitals.

Even then the mandatory note of regret has to be read out aloud at the time of someone’s departure, with the solemnity generally maintained when a person is about to commit the ultimate social sin of entering a new marriage at the conclusion of an old and abandoned one. More often than not, they are flat, exposing the lazy nature of those who offer them — like that gentleman who was so very excited when he came up with his resignation letter from his third party in quick succession, this time for failing to win a Senate nomination. True to his record, he made little effort to wrap his exit in drama. The results were there for everyone to see. It was not so much his frequent political separations but his unsophisticated parting acts that brought him flak. The points he was unable to score at this particular moment — when he was last seen leaving the party — could well be one reason why he has so far not been signed up by another political brand.

The gentleman who left without a whimper is by far not the person to be nominated for an award for the clumsiest manner in which to end a stint with a party. There have been so many others who have shown a total lack of imagination and understanding of the art of leaving in the ongoing Pakistani season of political departures. There have been apparently perfectly groomed political players who have revealed their inability to think beyond the ordinary— such as the man who opted out of the PPP because of Asif Zardari’s penchant for reconciliation, and that too at a time when Zardari Sahib was finally turning hostile towards the ‘right people’.

But in the fitness of things, it has to be someone from the PML-N who should get the top award for offering the cutest justification for leaving the party. Whereas there may be many contestants and the roll will surely grow with time, it is difficult to beat the conscientious gentleman who parachuted out of the anti-PML-N camp after a PIA plane originally bound for Islamabad had to be rerouted to Lahore because of the weather. As the plane made its way down to the Allama Iqbal airport it hit a bird, necessitating some urgent repair work and causing some delay before it could finally take off for the capital. The episode was just too much of a burden for the honourable MNA. That was it, the end. Time to quit. It is a pity that his declaration in which he admitted just how embarrassed he was at being a member of the Sharif party didn’t get the kind of attention that it deserved, probably because of the routine, mundane, unimaginative explanations that are so happily grabbed and exploited by those moving out of the undesirable political company in a hurry.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2018