Daily Times

A prodigious crowd with more than 200,000 people lay before his eyes. Cheering, dancing and singing, they were eager to march towards a better future in 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 gatherings in the history of Lahore, the 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 mesmerise the members of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). Lahore, they presumed after that display of power, had been snatched out of the hands of the Sharifs to be known as the stronghold of the PTI.

Addressing them at the Minar-e-Pakistan, the former cricket captain, for the first time in his 15-year 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 the PPP in Islamabad and equally dissatisfied with the governance of the 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 realised how powerful he has become over time and how popular he indeed was with this ‘tsunami’. “God must be on my side,” he may have thought. His faith had never been shaken before but had never been as strong either when he offered the maghrib prayers on the stage. All the predictions of the Sufis and saints who had been forecasting his success for almost a decade were becoming a reality. Pakistan, he may have realised, has changed and this rally was 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 Qureshi and from Asghar Khan to Sheikh Rasheed, the PTI was the ‘it’ party, the platform to join, to be heard, to make a difference, to be popular, to be considered a hero 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 closed in front of his eyes and the veil 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 grew stronger. He became increasingly confident that the landslide victory to make him the next prime minister was just 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 in a matter of a few months without a significant fight? To be honest, neither he nor his message were 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 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 the PPP representing the left leaning liberals and the PML-N standing for the right wing conservatives. With the assassination of Benazir, the failure of the PPP to provide a viable alternative and its poor performance at the Centre, together created a vacuum that Imran was able to fill with his narrative of social justice, equality and anti-corruption. Due to his right leaning politics and his relentless criticism on 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 the PPP out of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Had Benazir 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 beneficiary of her martyrdom. No, I am not suggesting that he had anything to do with her assassination. Even his archrivals would agree that Imran does not believe in violence. However, we can all agree that when it comes to political suicide out of his immaturity, self-righteousness and impetuosity, it is an entirely different story for the chairman of the PTI.

On August 14, the day Pakistan came into being, Imran has, without 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.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com