Is It the People’s Vengeance against Imran Khan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

The drubbing couldn’t be more categorical and pronounced. One could bet, without fear of losing, that ‘Kaptan’ Imran Khan (IK) never received a drubbing like the one administered to him, and his ruling PTI elites, by the people of Khyber Pakhtoon Khwa (KPK) at the recent Local Bodies polls in the province.

The verdict of the people is unambiguous, and the polling figures speak of them without any iota of doubt.

Out of the 58 seats up for grabs, PTI could barely manage to bag 14—less than 25 percent of the total at stake. More humiliating is the fact that the ruling elite couldn’t win any of the four mayoral contests –-a slap in the face from the province’s urban citizens.

Adding insult to injury, PTI—a self-proclaimed harbinger of ‘change’ in the entire calculus of governance in Pakistan—has lost out to JUI, an obscurantist, motley, crowd of status-quo denizens donning the robes of a religious-political party. The JUI Supremo, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman is an unabashed and vocal adversary of IK who has been leading the opposition charge against him from day one of PTI in-power.

What’s worse for Imran and his acolytes is that a vote of no-confidence against them has been pronounced by the people of KPK, where they have ruled for more than eight years. It was KPK that had heralded PTI to power long before the rest of the country was ready to trust the new kids of the bloc.

PTI’s success in KPK, in 2013, was the first manifestation of the people trusting Imran and his cohorts by vesting them with political power. It’s an incontrovertible fact that PTI’s good governance in KPK paved the way for its rise to power in Islamabad, at the last general elections, in 2018.

There’s, therefore, a subtle poetic irony in the people’s verdict at the Local Bodies polls. The province that had smoothed the way for PTI’s ascendancy may well have served an advance notice that its fortunes were on the wane and could, possibly, be eclipsed before long.

The outcome of the KPK polls should serve as a wakeup call to IK and his coteries-in-power. However, the initial reaction from IK down to his close aides is to look for scapegoats.

The blame game has been kicked off in right earnest. IK, in his own right, has pointed the finger at faulty selection of candidates running under the party banner; most other of his minions have opted for ‘conspirators’ and black sheep within the party stabbing its nominated candidates in their back and colluding, unabashedly, with adversaries.

A lone exception among this crowd of IK’s hangers-on, eager to please the ‘boss,’ is Senator Shibli Faraz. Speaking, on the heels of the drubbing, with a candor characteristic of his celebrated poet-father, Ahmed Faraz, Shibli laid it out plainly and categorically: it’s the poor track-record in governance by PTI that has done it in.

IK should be reminded of the message that the politically-conscious voters in US tried to deliver, in vain, to the then-President Bush Sr at the 1992 presidential election when he was running to save his presidency against the challenge mounted by Bill Clinton. The ‘message’ said it, plainly and truthfully: ‘it was the Economy, Stupid.’

Bush Sr had much better credentials to rely on; he’d, after all, won the Gulf War, of 1991, and trounced Saddam Hussein to force him to vacate his occupation of Kuwait.

IK has none of those credentials to boast of. Right, that he has been painfully and laboriously trying to fix the infrastructure of an economy mangled by a succession of corrupt regimes—of filching Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. But in the bargain, he has burdened the common man—a whopping 98 percent of Pakistan’s 220 million people—with a crushing grind of ensuring that his family may afford to eat two square meals a day.

With all his commendable elan to build a ‘New Pakistan,’ all that the common man of Pakistan could identify his rule with is a mind-boggling spiral of cost of living; of ever-increasing prices of basic necessities of life; of an un-mitigating thrust of rising graph in what he has to pay, month after month, for electricity, for gas and other essentials of every-day living.

The voters of KPK have spoken and delivered their verdict, in black and white, with no shades of grey that could be twisted or mis-interpreted. They have judged PTI on the basis of its performance, and not its promises. IK may dream of making his Pakistan a model of modern-day ‘Riyasat-e-Medina' but what he and his party—in their three-and-a-half years in power—have delivered is a tale of misery, of toil and sweat for the common man.

This outcome should jog IK and his men out of their slumber.

What the people of KPK have said could, easily, reverberate in other provinces of Pakistan at the next general elections, in 2023 or any time sooner.

IK should have the sense to appreciate that KPK’s verdict is no less than a wakeup- call for him. The time of sloganeering should be over. It should be over now, this very instant. ‘Kaptan’ should return to his drawing board with a categorical awareness that his charm-offensive with the people has been nailed and his popularity badly bruised.

A reality check has been served to the ruling elite of PTI. To be fair to them, they were never afforded the luxury of a period of honeymoon. Their adversaries—of whom Fazalur Rehamn was a king-pin—ganged up against them from the moment they stepped into the corridors of power in Islamabad. IK’s political nemeses—most of them corrupt to the bone—could only be emboldened to make a more determined push against him and oust him from power.

Now that his flanks have been exposed and his vulnerability at the polls becoming a tool in the hands of his adversaries and enemies, they wouldn’t be averse from using it to the hilt.

A retrograde political soldier-of-fortune, like Fazalur Rehman would be a natural choice for IK’s enemies to mount an assault at his fortress of power. Fazal—better known to the common man as ‘Mulla Diesel’--is an epitome of Machiavellian politics. But know he has, under his belt, a political mandate given to him by the denizens of a province that was widely believed to be an impregnable bastion of PTI’s popularity with the people.

IK has no more the comfort that KPK is his party’s redoubtable bastion. The signals from KPK may not take long before reaching other corners of Pakistan. Punjab, run by a lack-luster and color-less acolyte of IK could well be the next domino to fall. Sindh has long been left at the mercy of a mega-corrupt Zardari and his gang of thieves. Baluchistan is not quite out of the woods, with its own litany of problems. Gwadar—the lynchpin of the ambitious CPEC—has just barely snuffed out a popular, mass agitation.

So, IK should have no more comfort zone to fall back on his slogans and promises. He has not quite a year-and-a-half to make a lunge to close the gap between his promises and people’s expectations off him. It’s not going to be easy. On the contrary, all the signs point to a period of hard-sell for him, as far as his equation with an increasingly diffident people of Pakistan is concerned.

On top of it all, he has to keep an eye, all the time, on a vengeful and uncouth collection of political adversaries who have smelled blood in the outcome of the polls in KPK.

IK’s still- considerable followers and aficionados should pray that he comes out swinging and roaring from this debacle, as he used to in his hey-days at the head of Pakistan cricket. - k_k_ghori@hotmail.com

 

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)