NOWADAYS one can notice three prominent streams of political opinion among the people of Pakistan; one, the diehard blind followers of the ousted prime minister, two, active supporters of the opposition alliance, and, three, an objective realisation that the vehement support to Imran Khan over the years had led to shattered dreams.

The sad ending of the fairytale is most relevant to the third category. This category generally includes dreamers, who believed they had got a leader who would help them realise their dream; the dream of a society based on truth, justice, equality, freedom and welfare that would be governed by true representatives of people.

They believed their leader had the intention as well as the ability to help them see social change during their lives. However, none of those two foundational pillars seemed to exist. This category includes many who had attended corner meetings of a brand new ‘under construction’ party, especially in the city of Lahore where the party was born. Their hopes were high and they believed in the power of the man to somehow produce

a progressive society that would economically and socially stable.

The first of the three categories enumerated above comprises emotionally-charged individuals behaving in a very peculiar and astonishingly uniform fashion based on an indoctrination of vilification, a sense of self-righteousness, hostility, superiority and fanaticism. The very potent tools of ‘religion’ and ‘national security’ have been extensively used in carrying out the indoctrination.

Many of these people can sustain the situation as the tendency to get emotionally charged, and of course the release of certain hormones in the body, can keep them going. Their fairytale can continue for a while longer.

The end of the fairytale for the third category was a process that had started sometime ago, but has finally crossed the finishing line with lots of withheld tears; not of happiness, but of sadness and despair. They understand they were badly deceived, but still feel sad sitting on the pile of their shattered dreams.

This category now gets attacked, vilified and condemned by those currently on the set of the fairytale. Their only response is to hope and pray that Pakistani society may not go through more of such pain.

Jehanzeb Zafar
Lahore

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2022