Imran on a Revenge Mission
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
Westfield, IN
A prodigious crowd with more than two hundred thousand people lay before his eyes. Cheering, dancing and singing, they were eager to march towards a better future of Pakistan, a future that would be built upon equality and justice. Most of them were young, but old and middle aged, rich and poor, tall and short, successful professionals and small business owners, farmers, technicians, university graduates and even PhDs, everyone was there. It was one of the largest gathering in the history of Lahore, a beginning of a dream coming true.
The enormous size of the crowd on October 31, 2011, I am sure, must have surprised the host and the sole reason for the show, Imran Khan, as well, who made sure to offer prayers in front of the camera to gain further support. The memories of that evening are so powerful that even after three years they still mesmerize the members of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Lahore, they presumed after that display of power, has been snatched out of the hands of the Sharifs to be known as the stronghold of PTI.
Addressing them on Minar-e-Pakistan, the former cricket captain, for the first time in his fifteen years of political career, appeared as a leader with popular support, a politician with a strong and devoted following, and an emerging threat to both the established parties in power. It would be impossible to disregard him as a television warrior anymore. He had swung a large number of people on his side who were dissatisfied with the state of affairs in Pakistan: unhappy with the performance of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Islamabad and equally dissatisfied with the governance of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) in Punjab. Leading through his personal example, he was confident he would represent the young, educated, honest, confident and studious middle class. This was going to be his domain, his area of strength where he would shine alone without any rivals.
Considering the magnitude of the rally, he must have realized how powerful he has become overtime and how popular he indeed was with this Tsunami. God must be on his side, he may have thought. His faith had never shaken before but had never been as strong either when he offered the Maghreb prayers on the stage. All the predictions of the sufis and saints who have been forecasting his success for almost a decade were becoming a reality. Pakistan, he may have realized, has changed and this rally is the evidence.
I am not sure if Pakistan changed that day or not but I am sure that Imran did. People started joining his party in flocks. From Javed Hashmi to Shah Mehmood and from Asghar Khan to Sheikh Rasheed, PTI was the ‘it’ party, the platform to join, to be heard, to make a difference, to be popular, to be considered as a hero’s and of course to go to for ‘moral’ dry cleaning and reprocessing. Imran, overwhelmed with this new kind of pressure, did not know how to manage the influx of so many people. A curtain of ruthless pragmatism drew in front of his eyes and the veils of unrealistic idealism evaporated in the next year or so, leading him to accept politicians from all parties and to provide them with his certificate of honesty and patriotism, a dangerous trend that is going to be deeply imbibed in his party.
As the size of his rallies grew bigger his conviction about his triumph got stronger, he became increasingly confident that the landslide victory which would make him the next Prime Minister is an election away. Nonetheless, overconfidence apart, the real question is if he should have been that optimistic and the road to victory was going to be that easy. Should he have overestimated himself that he could sweep Punjab, take over Karachi and rule in Khyber PakhtunKhwa (KPK) in a matter of few months without a significant fight?
To be honest, neither he nor his message was new. His party had been around for at least a decade and he had been on television for years. Till 2007, he was considered just an amateur politician, a celebrity with an ‘honest’ voice but definitely unrealistic. So what made him click in 2011?
As long as Benazir Bhutto (BB) was alive, there was no place for any politician in Pakistan to emerge as a national leader. Two major contestants to get people’s votes were: PPP representing the left leaning liberals and the PML-N standing for the right wing conservatives.
With the assassination of BB, the failure of PPP to provide a viable alternative and its poor performance in the center, together created a vacuum that Imran was able to fill in with his narrative of social justice, equality and corruption. Due to his right leaning politics and his relentless criticism of the PML-N leadership, many gurus misconstrued that the vote bank of Mian Nawaz Sharif was being attacked, but the ground situation was a little trickier: Imran did not sway PML-N voters much; rather he just wiped PPP out of Punjab and KPK. Had BB been alive, in my opinion, there was no way that he would have succeeded in gaining any significant political strength. From that aspect, one may think that he is the biggest benefactor of her martyrdom. No, I am not suggesting that he had anything to do with her assassination. Even his arch rivals would agree that Imran does not believe in violence. However, we can agree when it comes to political suicide out of his immaturity, self-righteousness and impetuosity, it is an entirely different story for the Chairman of PTI.
On 14 th of August, the day Pakistan came into being, Imran has, without a surprise, decided to start the process of killing the spirit of democracy, committed to derail the whole process in the name of election rigging and has planned to throw the country back into a decade of martial law again, a suicide attempt that may lead to the demolition and fragmentation of the whole country. It will be his revenge for losing the elections for which the people of Pakistan will pay the price.
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