Daily Times

He is the man who fought corruption with the introduction of dharna politics. And now Imran Khan’s party workers are treating him to a taste of his own medicine. Images of Kaptaan addressing the PTI ‘masses’ while flanked by the police suggest that he is holding his own. For now.

The protestors, numbering up to 2,000, spent the last three days at the party chairman’s Bani Gala residence. Their one-point agenda has been agitation against the awarding of party tickets to the undeserving. That is, to the so-called electables — such as Sikander Hayat Bosan, who was a PMLN man and sitting federal minister right up until the assemblies dissolved — as opposed to those who have been in it at the grass-roots level for the long haul. Linked to this is frustration over candidates being favoured to represent constituencies in which they have never lived.

Imran, for his part, has responded in the way that those who hold power often do: by appealing for due process. Quite possibly a top tip he picked up from the Centre during those heady days of the 2014 sit-ins. Thus he has reassured the PTI rank-and-file that he is ready to listen to their grievances provided they comply with party procedure and submit review petitions. What he is not willing to do, however, is kowtow to popular pressure. All of which suggests that the PTI chief may need more than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

To be sure, the party workers’ complaints are legitimate. Naturally, these are not peculiar to PTI alone. But given that Kaptaan has long championed a mandate supposedly of the people, by the people, for the people — such in-house allegations of ‘corruption’ risk seriously denting his vote bank.

Yet none of this should surprise anyone. Least of all the PTI rank-and-file. After all, part and parcel of playing the great political game is free trading in opportunism’s currency. This is something that Imran has been comfortable with for some time. From not admitting the ideological disconnect between promoting democracy and legitimising the rule of a military dictator. To his not unreasonable anti-drone posturing being irreconcilable with admitting into the party a member of the then ruling regime who rather audaciously denied the existence of such a programme. More recently, PTI workers have borne witness to Imran’s warm embrace of a television anchor with a well-known penchant for incitement to religious hatred. This is not to mention his having in attendance a former party secretary-general whom the Supreme Court disqualified from holding public for life.

The message being delivered, therefore, is that the PTI chairman has surrendered his long-held principles. And it matters not that Kaptaan took the honourable step of expelling 20 MPAs over charges of horse-trading in the Senate elections. For, sadly, the fact remains that a party so dedicated to wooing big names and even bigger turncoats is one that primarily serves the elite. And this is not the Naya Pakistan of the ordinary (wo)man but the status quo. The only saving grace being that this is well and truly out in the open; even if it is in the immediate run-up to next month’s ballot-boxing. For the simple truth is that, presently, the real power rests in the hands of the party workers.

We hope they use it wisely. If, that is, they want a real revolution.  *

Published in Daily Times, June 21^st 2018.