Daily Times

The other day I heard a learned journalist saying on television: “Since the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan claims to be a tiger in the jungle, therefore, he cannot afford to be humble.”

Well, with all due respect to the highly educated newsman, I hereby wish to add (if not correct him) that during the last century, the world have seen many towering leaders who were extremely cultured in their public and private conversations, despite being authoritative in the choice of forceful phrases to add conviction to their arguments. A few of these soft-spoken leaders included Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Allama Mohammad Iqbal, Mahatma Gandhi, ex-British prime minister, Winston Churchill, former US presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and the legendary South African leader Nelson Mandela.

If Imran Khan likes, he can take a leaf out of Indian cricket team captain M S Dhoni’s book, or study the humility of other cricketing icons including Messrs Misbah-ul-Haq, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Donald Bradman, Richard Hadlee, late Martin Crowe, Mahela Jayawardene, Hashim Amla, Jack Kallis, AB de Villiers, Zaheer Abbas, Sunil Gavaskar, Clive Lloyd, Glenn McGrath, Kumar Sangakaara, Muralitharan and Younis Khan.

Being an ardent follower of cricket, I have seen all the afore-mentioned cricketers reigning the cricket fields supreme for many years, and yet the matchless success did not get to their heads. In fact, their heads kept bowing down further with every feat they accomplished during their illustrious careers.

See, nobody is asking Khan to give-up his ‘crusade’ against the incumbent Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) regime. We just do not want him to be foul-mouthed. Here, I am not exonerating any PML-N stalwarts who have been using harsh language against their opponents.

Khan is vociferously hitting out at Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for constructing and inaugurating motorways, bridges and airports. I wish to add to Khan’s vast knowledge of international history that when the Great Depression of the 1930s had rocked America and other European countries, the then US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had decided to meet the immediate crisis of starvation and the dire needs of the nation’s unemployed by establishing several public relief programmes in 1933. By the end of 1930, some 744 American banks had failed. In all, 9,000 banks had failed during the decade of the 1930s. It’s estimated that 4,000 banks failed during the one year of 1933 alone. By 1933, depositors saw $140 billion disappearing through bank failures.

During this challenging period, the American Civilian Conservation Corps had put 300,000 young men to work in 1,200 camps planting trees, building bridges, and cleaning beaches. The United States Civil Works Administration had gone on to spend almost one billion dollars 83 years ago on public works projects, including airports and roads. According to a Miller Centre Report, unemployment had grown to over 25 percent of the nation’s workforce, with more than 12 million Americans out of work. President Roosevelt had also set out to help American industry get back onto its feet by creating two new agencies, the Public Works Administration and the National Recovery Administration.

The Public Works Administration alone had a budget of over three billion dollars. To spur the economy toward full employment and a decent standard of living for the ‘common man’, the administration in 1935 made three successful proposals to Congress. First, a $4.8 billion fund to create the Works Progress Administration was rushed through the US Congress. Then to care for those unable to work, the Social Security Administration was formed on the model of an insurance company, using payroll deductions from workers for a trust fund that would provide unemployment insurance, aid for dependent mothers, children, and the blind, and a monthly income to those over 65 who had contributed to the system.

As was the case in August 2014, Khan and his like-minded ally Tahir-ul-Qadri are now publicly raising slogans in favour of Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif. No harm in that, but the former Pakistan cricket captain had once supported army ruler General Pervez Musharraf whole-heartedly during his referendum too. Although after having backed Musharraf, Khan had started pointing his daggers towards him too. A candid example of a national leader’s vision! Not taunting here, but can you trust Khan’s judgment qualities?

Khan was once a fan of the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as well, having supported him during the judiciary restoration movement of 2007. Just years later, the PTI chief had shifted the blame of his 2013 electoral defeat on Chaudhry and the then election commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, whom he had endorsed so strongly.

Once, Khan was the worst political foe of the Chaudharys of Gujarat, but they are his allies today. Khan was extremely critical of Pakistan People’s Party’s corruption, and had accused the late Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Ali Zardari of stealing from the national coffers and laundering nation’s money abroad. Today, Khan is busy knitting an anti-government alliance with Zardari’s party, or is perhaps keeping the door open for Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari to step into his container.

In February 2013, Khan had called on the then incumbent president Asif Ali Zardari to explain where he had earned the money to build the ‘lavish 120-kanal’ Bilawal House in Lahore. Khan was addressing a congregation in Chakwal then. During this particular corner meeting, Khan had stated that 70 percent of the national parliamentarians were tax evaders.

Khan has often dubbed the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain a killer and an extortionist. Not bad, but it was the same Khan who had visited the MQM headquarters at 90-Azizabad in the Federal B Area of Karachi on December 16, 1996 to condole the murders of Altaf Hussain’s elder brother, Nasir Hussain and nephew, Arif Hussain, whose badly mutilated corpses were found in an isolated area of port city’s Gaddap Town on December 9, 1995. Nasir Hussain and Arif Hussain were killed just days after Ehsan Ali Shah, a government official and the younger brother of the then Sindh chief minister Syed Abdullah Shah, was shot dead along-with his two friends in Karachi. Interestingly, during his December 16, 1996 visit to Altaf’s residence, Khan had opined: “Altaf Hussain is a real patriot.”

And not long ago, we heard his sermon against Altaf Hussain and the MQM. Khan had accused Hussain of orchestrating the murder of one of his party members, Zehra Shahid, in May 2013. Less than a year before that, on August 7, 2012, a key MQM leader Farooq Sattar had invited Khan to visit Nine Zero once again, following his Lahore meeting with leaders of the PTI.

Actually, since the inception of the PTI in 1996, Khan has been busy trading allegations with most of his political adversaries, and then embracing a few of his own choice when it suited him.

And there is a lot more to write about Khan’s controversies and his conflicting statements, but the above-mentioned examples should suffice.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was watching a Geo TV report on Tahir-ul-Qadri, who has criticised Prime Minister Sharif for nourishing an amicable relationship with the Narendra Modi regime across the border. Geo also reported that Qadri was no alien to the incumbent Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi either. Despite the killing of hundreds of Muslims in the Modi-governed Gujarat during 2002, Dr Qadri had accepted the status of a state guest in this state during his February-March 2012 visit to various Indian cities. Modi was the chief minister of the Gujarat state during Qadri’s visit, as he was a decade earlier when rioting had officially resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Muslims. But during his Indian visit, Qadri had refused to comment on the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, and was instead seen riding in a 30-foot long Lincoln limousine equipped with two 18-inch flat screen television sets, a DVD player, a satellite radio and a refrigerator.

As a nation, do we forget all these things so easily?

I hereby quote a newspaper researcher and an eminent journalist opining once in his Daily Jang/The News story that had crowds mattered, the revered Muslim scholar and an anti-Pakistan activist Syed Attaullah Shah Bokhari (1892-1961) would not have let Pakistan come into existence. The Patna-born Attaullah Shah Bokhari, a Muslim Hanafi Deobandi Scholar, was a firebrand orator. His speeches were studded with a lot of wisdom and logic. He used to draw and attract massive crowds while airing his rhetoric against Jinnah and his demand for a separate homeland for Muslims.

Bokhari, as history tells us, was one of the most notable leaders of the Ahrar movement that was associated with opposition to Quaid-e-Azam. Bokhari’s speeches would graphically portray the sorrows and sufferings of the poor, as he promised his audience that the end of their sufferings would come about with the end of the British rule,

(Reference: Page 98 of Syed-ul-Ahrar, a book authored by Professor Abbas Najmi and Latif Khalid Cheema)

Attracting crowds is just a psychological tool to temporarily unnerve and rattle one’s political opponents. They do not play a decisive role at all because people listen to everybody and attend all rallies, but they actually believe very few leaders.

The writer is a graduate of LUMS and currently serves as an MPA of Punjab. She tweets at @hinaparvezbutt