Daily Times

Imran Khan’s show in Lahore, after all his harangue, hubbub and the rabble-rousing dharnas (sit-ins) to deter drones and dislodge the government was rather quite impressive, well organised and orchestrated. Shehzad Roy riveting together some disparate lines meant to impart a new mood to the event was a radical departure from the hortatory poems hitherto recited at such large rallies. This was perhaps explicitly intended to indicate the predominance of a pop culture among Imran’s relatively younger followers. Still, some verses of Iqbal berating the old political system were inserted to cover up the intermittent interludes engineered to reduce stress and replenish Imran’s sinking stamina and speech, help him sip some water and create suspense. This was also quite symptomatic of our official traditions to keep Iqbal on the backburner to spice up the main menu. Some of Imran’s detractors like Ahsan Iqbal from the Nawaz League dubbed it less of a political meeting and more of a music concert. To most others it felt like a well rehearsed surreal riff or documentary meticulously devised and orchestrated by our grand masters of the establishment. Yet, despite its well drilled and disciplined display and denouement, it was miserably disappointing in its content, theme and message and dashed the hopes for any real workable alternative or new option so loudly perpetrated by the boisterous bowler bent on burlesque deliveries to bag all wickets. Most of the concoction, so confidently touted by him to transform the politics in this country, was culled from the passionate, idealistic, unimaginative and impracticable stuff ceaselessly bombarded by the anchor brigades. Unfortunately, the screed lacked the slightest strands of reality and rational views and marked an utter ignorance of the existing rules and procedures.

Imran Khan’s challenge to the representative potentates to declare their assets, for instance, was inherently superfluous as all candidates for the legislature are already bound to file their assets before elections, which in turn are also open to scrutiny and perusal. Even ordinary government functionaries tender their asset sheets. The real need of course is to create a regular robust mechanism to probe the inexplicable exponential aggregation of wealth without genuine apparent means. This, nonetheless, is also a long drawn intricate investigative and legal marathon, which in no case can exude instant oodles of funds to finance the presently pressing needs. Even governments emerging through violent bloody revolutions in various countries could not accomplish this miracle. So is the case with $ 120 to $ 500 billion reported to be locked in foreign banks and assets. The claims and cases for its retrieval could be even more cumbersome and cost-intensive. Similarly, his claim about Rs 3,000 billion being swept away by corruption is hard to justify in a country where total annual receipts hardly match this figure. Actually this morbid hype against corruption, to a large extent, is part of a rather broader design to insinuate the representative system and to deflect attention from unusually exorbitant funds poured in our ever widening defence and security gyre. Theoretically, the country perhaps would be billowing in milk, honey and gold if corruption is eliminated and planeloads of the wealth purported to have been plundered from us are returned, but presently the bleak reality stalking the nation may be realised from a recent revelation by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) that out of the Rs 1,550 billion collected by it, Rs 750 billion were taken by debt servicing, Rs 441 billion by defence, and that left merely Rs 359 billion to run the entire remaining state apparatus.

Yet Imran circumvented the harsh reality of broadening the tax net and collection. The failure would evidently force us to besiege the benefactors or slash the entire defence, development and service sectors to about a third of their present size. He rather came up with some more quixotic cures to raise the generating capacity to 60,000 MW, tap Balochistan’s mammoth copper reserves and coal deposits. But he naively skipped the Saindak saga and the scarce requisite skills, technology and investment for these schemes and the subsequent vital issues of education, skill enhancement, health and shelter, floods and disasters. He spurns foreign aid, wants the US to dance to our tunes but still expects it to transfer investment, skills and resources to us. He conveniently ignores that if he cannot run a hospital without foreign assistance, how would he run the entire country. Unfortunately, despite his education, exposure and extensive philandering in the west, he failed to imbibe any cosmopolitan spirit and relapsed into a tribal and Taliban mould. True to the popular epithets of ‘Taliban Khan’ and ‘a beard in his belly’ (pait mein daarrhi) earned by him, his solution for terrorism was rather bizarre as pulling out the army from these troubled terrains would leave their peaceful population at the mercy of the monstrous butchery of the terrorists.

His elixir to cure the police, patwari (land record officer) and court cultures was equally naive. Representative sheriffs could mean even more mistrust and vengeance among the local clans. In our society, the lack of tolerance and a dignified deference to the rights and authority of a winner through a democratic election are vividly exemplified not only by Imran’s own continuous and cantankerous confrontation but also by the excessively inflated Sharifs. The local government system has not yet effectively evolved even at the district level and extending it to the thanas (police stations) would further erode their impartiality at the initial routine cognizance and investigation steps. The patwari culture is already being phased out through computerisation while his assertions to stop the ‘sale of justice’ in the courts was contradictory to the claims of an independent judiciary as the responsibility of inefficiency and corruption in the lower judicial tiers evidently rests with its higher tiers. The rest of his address was merely a volley of threats to stir further discord and disturbance, including a movement of civil disobedience. Imran Khan’s speech failed to present any vision or viable new option that the masses, mauled by inflation, inadequate income and amenities, so anxiously yearned for. There is of course an evident new option to save Pakistan by making the people the real pivot of state policies, shedding the decades-old obsession to match the military might of a far larger neighbour, seeking strategic depth in alien lands through proxy demons and neutering all shades of terrorism through a sincere and active coordination with the international fraternity. It involves an extensive and symbiotic interaction with the advanced world to acquire excellence in engineering, science, technology, manufacturing, marketing and social welfare imperatives. But leaders like Imran Khan, invariably perceived to have been propped up by the establishment to keep the PPP and the PML-N players in proper allegiance, would perhaps never strive for this option.

The writer is an academic and freelance columnist. He can be reached at habibpbu@yahoo.com