Daily Times

After a failed march, confused call for ‘civil disobedience’, and now threatening the institutions of state and welfare of his followers, Imran Khan has shown that while people criticise the government for not moving on solving the crisis earlier, it may have been impossible for them to do so. Observably, trying to remove the elected government via a putsch was his desire from the beginning. He has abused the democratic right of protest enshrined in the Constitution for selfish purposes, to the detriment of all Pakistanis. That right is limited within law to prevent protest from creating civil disturbances and trampling on the constitutional rights of other citizens. If people feel this right is unreasonably limited, the idea is that parliament legislates to remove unjust limitations. Beyond this democratic right lies the human right to rise up against oppression, which arguably is what the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) are invoking. Mass movements of this nature have historically occurred in societies such as Tsarist Russia or pre-revolution Iran, where all protest was prohibited. However, if we speak about rights at this stage the state has a right within the limits of law to protect the institutions that comprise it. Where does this right proceed from? It was given by ordinary citizens when they refused to join Imran in protest or ‘civil disobedience’, shown by the modest following that arrived to protest and the rejection of ‘civil disobedience’ by traders associations, industrialists, merchants and everyone else who actually pays taxes in Pakistan. The government officially asked the army to aid the police in security of the Red Zone, an area designated because of security concerns over terrorism, which leads to the conclusion that having abused his democratic rights, whipped up a crowd into a frenzy for blood, and after breaking faith over his written assurance to not enter the Red Zone, if protestors are arrested or violence occurs, the responsibility lies entirely on Imran’s head. The move is also a subtle sign that the military, despite its reported reservations on some policies of the Nawaz regime, will not allow the writ of the state expressed through the security of sensitive installations to be compromised. This is also true of the PTI’s threat to stop electricity from Tarbela Dam if the government cuts off electricity to defaulters. It could be deemed an unconstitutional act.
The contradiction rife in the PTI’s protest is that it cannot bring down the federal government without acknowledging that its own mandate, for better or worse, is invalid. Will another election result in more or less seats for the party, and if less, will it again claim it was cheated? Some party members have refused to resign from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Assembly and a no-confidence motion tabled against Chief Minister Pervez Khattak yesterday has made it impossible for him to dissolve the Assembly. The PTI is now in danger of losing its government there. The possibility that the protest was held to pressure the government into a weaker negotiating position appears to have backfired. Simultaneously it has alienated every other political party by alleging that their mandates are false as well. Many parties, like the MQM, have the street power and organisation to put the PTI’s protest to shame and regularly assemble thousands of people for sit-ins and protests. They do not threaten to overthrow an elected parliament however. Imran Khan, had he taken his opportunity to run KP like a model province and reformed unjust laws through legislation, might have been prime minister in five years time, but perhaps it is better that his delusional tendencies were exposed now than in the prime minister’s house. The lack of a visible following shows how deeply disillusioned voters have become with him, since they voted for him because of his perceived policies, not personal love for the man, as he imagines. The crowd he has assembled in front of parliament now waits in vain for a resignation that is not forthcoming. Having wasted its credibility, this misadventure may spell the end of the PTI as a political force in the long run. *