Daily Times

In politics, timing is everything. No matter how strong your position and convictions may be, if you do not maximise your benefits while the iron is hot, you eventually end up in a tight and precarious spot. Being an ordinary observer, I do not experience any exhilaration when my two cents worth of predictions come true. Without going into the comic details of the hilarious sound bites all of us have been subjected to for the last several months from Mr Khan and his ardent followers, one such bite is an absolute gem. One of his budding and faithful young parliamentarians from Swat stands and parrots it almost on a daily basis. It goes something like this: “Mr Khan accepted the results of the elections but not the rampant rigging in the elections.” This is a rather oxymoronic statement. As a pea-brained student of logic, I would assert that once you accept the results of the elections, that is the end right there. You demonstrate your unconditional approval of those allegedly ‘rigged’ elections by reaching the National Assembly with 34 elected candidates and by forming a government in a province. The rest is all meaningless blabber.
The gifted analysts who try to somehow draw a parallel between the recent elections and the ones held in 1977 are definitely high on energy drinks. In 1977, the opposition parties, comprising of mostly rightwing religious parties, formed an alliance called the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA). The day after the National Assembly polls of March 7, 1977, the PNA cried foul and boycotted the provincial Assembly polls scheduled for March 10, 1977. At least to the PNA’s credit, its stance was very straightforward from the word go. Unlike the PTI, it rejected the polls outright and, of course, never went to the Assemblies to take any oaths.
The idiot box is littered with talking and bobbing heads regurgitating the same old lines that both the members of the PTI and the ruling party have been selling like a new product when, in fact, it is so boring to hear the epic, which starts with the plethora of allegations raised by Mr Khan and the emphasis laid on four constituencies, to the request by the Prime Minister (PM) to the apex court to probe the election matters, to the ongoing sit-ins in Islamabad.
I do not gloat when my long distance predictions come true, like the one I made about November 30, 2014 being just another whimper. Mind you, the anchors-cum-stars on the idiot box were selling it like it was D-Day. For that matter, Mr Khan was roaring that it was going to be a “decisive battle”. One of his favorite channels, a rather “red” one, had a tag line attached on that day that read: “The final battle”. To that channel’s sheer dismay, and perhaps to the dismay of many of Mr Khan’s lovers, all Khan did was give another series of deadlines. By now, anyone with a brain the size of a tiny dot can decipher that Khan does not have anything to reveal, sell or provide that carries any logical weight. All his assertions, allegations and rhetoric have been based on container theatrics.
Turning to an offensive posture, hawks in the ruling party have resorted to mudslinging and counter-allegations against Mr Khan and his party stalwarts. The exercising of a blame game and the exchange of heated arguments between the two is so juvenile that one wonders whether something somewhere went terribly wrong. One can conveniently blame it on the short supply of electricity that perhaps has had an adverse impact on the brain cells of these political adversaries.
The fact is abundantly clear that Khan wants to keep the pressure on by extending his deadlines with threats of potential and probable violence. All the euphemisms of Plan C, D and so on are a clear indication that he is in a blind alley, which of course he led himself into. It is also very clear that he is clueless and the guidance he is getting from his advisors and handlers is, to say the least, very poor. There is a video clip being played where he has rejected an intermediary’s request to have a direct dialogue between himself and the Prime Minister (PM).
The backpedaling regarding the dates of his shutdown call of Faisalabad, Karachi and Lahore and the clarification of the meaning of ‘shutdown’ is another indication that his brain is definitely not in thinking mode when in the legendary container. As it is the citizens are suffering and if Mr Khan thinks that the entire country can be ‘shutdown’ on the revised date of December 18, according to his bold assessment, then he needs a key to unlock his clogged brain cells. The ‘Nooners’, who feel that they should let Khan make more outlandish and hollow claims, as all those claims expose his political immaturity, are perhaps partially right.
If Khan thinks that playing the bluff of the threats will get him somewhere, then he is seriously mistaken. Similarly, if the Nooners believe that they can leap forward at the expense of their immature rival, then they are equally mistaken. This situation requires what is known as a cooling off period. There should be a gag order by the apex court for at least a week that is applicable on both. The idiot box, which fans these tensions, albeit unknowingly at times and deliberately at others, could take a time out as well. After a week of silence, without any media coverage, talks between the two parties must take place and perhaps outside of Pakistan on completely neutral ground. Both parties must commit to continuing dialogue and no participant should return to Pakistan until an agreement is signed. The onus lies on the ruling party to handle this situation with the utmost tact and a cool head. One wonders why all of this needs to be done. I have said in the past that these folks have to live and work with one another in the years to come. They better learn to live and work together amicably. There is light at the end of the tunnel that Khan has trapped himself in. Yes, the ruling party is holding that magic torch that can bring him out of this very unpleasant situation. Khan may be ultra-rigid and at times totally unreasonable, but who said politics was a bed of roses? One can only hope that Mr Sharif and his associates are adding more cucumbers in their salad, despite the cold weather, to keep the temperatures of their skulls at a healthy level.

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar