25 February 2013
By Saeed Qureshi
Imran Khan, the founder and the Chairman of the
political party, "Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is
quiet for quite some time. He must be pondering about
his future course by closeting him in his private
room. A political or public leader cannot sit idle or
remain away or isolated for long, from the public eye
and the countrymen. His eerie silence and diminished
activity pose a big question mark.
His celebrated, illustrious colleagues who hastily
joined the PTI with great exuberance are also
maintaining a stony silence. Recently we haven't heard
any policy enunciation or dissemination of the PTI
manifesto that must have been prepared with lot of
toil, intellectual input and by burning midnight oil.
These are crucial times for the political stalwarts to
kick around in the length and breadth of Pakistan with
all the sound and fury one can marshal or summon. It
is high time for Imran Khan to stage public meetings
in quick succession to convey his party's manifesto
and messages of hope and new salubrious beginning in
Pakistan.
He is one among the whole lot who enjoys a clean
slate, a reservoir of goodwill and a high moral ground
that he is perched on. Alas, he has wasted much
precious time in motivating people and winning support
of the people of Pakistan.
In one of my previous article on Imran Khan, I had
sketched his profile and personality in the following
paragraphs,"
"Imran Khan the Chief of PTI could have flashed, like
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a glowing star on the
political horizon of Pakistan. But all these years in
the politics, he has remained a non-starter. Once in a
while, he appears on the stage, frets and fumes,
displays his tantrums and then recedes into the
oblivion to reappear all of a sudden at a time of his
own choice.
He runs his political bandwagon by fits and starts. He
is sincere and possesses unbounded passion and
limitless energy to make a difference but his fury and
passion is invariably short-lived. He suffers from a
chronic malady of inconsistency and conceptual
bipolarity. He swerves from extreme to extreme on both
sides of his agenda. He thunders like the charged
clouds but then drifts away after a strong but brief
shower of hyperbolic statements and high sounding
propositions."
Now these impressions were jotted down some two years
ago and I vouch that these are still valid and
pertinent in regard to the mercurial and mysterious
character of Imran Khan. In all the bye-elections
candidates from either PPP or PMNL have taken the
lead. All that PTI has been doing is to boycott the
elections perhaps under the lurking fear that PTI
candidates cannot win.
If that is the defeatist attitude of the PTI leaders
to walk away from facing the electoral competitions,
then only a miracle can help PTI in capturing
reasonable number of seats in the forthcoming
provincial or federal elections.
The youth of Pakistan could have been a formidable
force for the PTI to reach nook and corner of Pakistan
and to awaken the people and to galvanize them against
the forces of status quo, the rapacious privileged
classes and the insidious system of governance. The
young lot of the country were all geared and ready to
work for the PTI to bolster it as the only party that
was clean and could bring about the revolutionary
reforms and give Pakistan an honest and clean
leadership.
Imran Khan's overblown metaphor of Tsunami has lost
its vigor and steam. It has been hibernating and
slumbering with no commotion to cleanse the Augean
stables of evils bedeviling Pakistan. Imran Khan has
been vacillating in making far-reaching and timely
intelligent decisions that could bear out his
political acumen and sagacity. The example of this
flippant tendency is manifest in supporting Qadri's
movement and then distancing from it.
His political alliances for instance with narrow-
based parties as JI and bluntly opposing PMNL speaks
for his immaturity and myopic vision as the leader of
a political party that should forge alliances with
progressive and deep-rooted parties. In all fairness
his natural alliance could be primarily with PMNL and
even other factions of Muslim League. MQM could be
another party that has a revolutionary agenda and
comes closer to the PTI for a monumental
transformation in favor of the common man and in
support of the downtrodden sections of society.
Since his forte is Punjab and some parts of NWFP
bordering with Punjab, he could have adjustment of
electoral candidates with PMNL. That strategy could
have ensured some seats for the PTI also. But in the
prevailing political brinkmanship, his biggest foe is
Nawaz Sharif and no one else. Thus he is in the habit
of betting on wrong horses and fails to read the
direction of the political wind.
Imran Khan seems to be disenchanted with politics for
some inexplicable reasons that he knows best only. But
factually this is the time to hold frequent press
conferences, have whirlwind tours of Pakistan and
generate a wave of apathy for the inimical forces that
have been wreaking Pakistan from day one.
He need to spit fire, show the skills of oration and
rhetorical outbursts to fire up and electrify the
people to pave way for a kind of peaceful French
Revolution against the blood sucking elitism
aristocracy, feudalism, bonapartism and other
exploitative outfits.
He is rendering himself irrelevant in the political
arena of Pakistan by sitting on the sidelines and
watching nonchalantly and with folded hands the fight
of others. I suspect that he is going through an
indecisive phase of introspection that clearly means
wastage of time and missing the bus of political
urgency.
He should be aware that other political parties are
well established. He is relatively a new-comer and has
to put in extra efforts and mount vigorous struggle
for PTI to be counted and reckoned with as a strong
political force and true representative of the
suffering people of Pakistan. Comments 💬 التعليقات |
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