Daily Times

One of the most talked about politicians of Pakistan in media after, of course, the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan, is not the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, or Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mian Nawaz Sharif, or his younger brother, Chief Minister of Punjab Shehbaz Sharif. Instead it is the local yet exceptionally vocal politician of Rawalpindi, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, the president of the Awami Muslim League.

Why? True that he does not have a real public following, and no one takes him seriously on the ballot paper, but his entertaining one-to-one interviews glues everyone to the set for almost an hour. To be honest, he performs very well in these shows even when he does not make much sense. As part of his presentation, he marinates his opinions with clichés, stir-fries them with common slang, add some juicy gossip, and in the end, pepper them with metaphors full of near-doomsday scenarios. Moreover, he zigzags between the topic avoiding real questions. He moves to the left when he senses trouble, and to the right before making a full U-turn. Combined, the end product is though hollow and loud like an empty drum but is almost as entertaining as an episode of Seinfeld, the most successful comedy show of American television of all times.

Earlier, aside from being the minister of railways, Sheikh Rasheed had served as the minster of information and mass media broadcasting for four years under the former dictator, General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf. And it is through his experience in dealing with journalists and their employers that Sheikh Rasheed understands how to stay in the news even when as a politician he does not hold any influence beyond Rawalpindi, his own constituency. As a matter of fact, what is being debated is not how effective he is in the city, but if he is effective at all in swaying the Pindi voters since the current National Assembly seat he won was only possible because of the support of the PTI.

In some of the recent appearances, you may have noticed that Sheikh Rasheed sounds like a bitter rival of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Mian Nawaz Sharif to the point of personal vengeance. Why? People believe that the reason for his fierce opposition is not because of the alleged involvement of the prime minister’s family in corruption since Rasheed was the member of Sharif’s cabinet in the 1990s, and may have been a part of the whole scheme that Panama leaks allude to, but because of Sharif’s insistence that the PML-N should not accept a turncoat like Rasheed back in his party. And since misery loves company, he found a natural ally in Imran Khan who has been ‘bitter’ after the 2013 general elections, which he thought he had won although the reality was different.

Fuelling that anger in 2014 it was Sheikh Rasheed, people say, who convinced Imran Khan to commence agitation and prolong the protest in Islamabad. The idea was to create a situation in which the intervention of the “third umpire” would be made necessary helping the opposition to secure a deal. However, the whole exercise failed, barring that it weakened the democratic process, and shrunk the popularity of Khan. To my surprise, even PTI’s staunch supporters and diehard fans of Khan were disappointed by the way their leader conducted himself during and after the four-month long protest.

Two years later, with the help of yet another controversial figure, Tahir-ul-Qadri, the leader of the Pakistan Awami Tehreek, Sheikh Rasheed has launched another campaign against the federal government. This time too, ‘the trio’ consisting of Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, Imran Khan and Tahir-ul-Qadri hopes for a ‘third party’ intervention. I do not think it will happen though because I believe the army is already preoccupied with multiple insurgencies and political unrest in Karachi, and also because I think people are just not responding to their calls and refuse to come out in an impressive number. No matter how strongly the PTI denies it, the fact is that rallies both in Rawalpindi and Lahore were not big enough to threaten the incumbent government.

With that indifference there is a lesson to be learnt; however, that is not for Sheikh Rasheed as he has nothing to lose and everything to gain from uncertainty and unrest. The lesson to learn is for the PTI and that is to wait for another 18 months and put all of its energy in defeating the PML-N in the general elections. As far as Sheikh Rasheed is concerned, all of us — media, public, the PTI — should stay away from him and ignore him as much as we can. Not having him on television for a month or so may, in turn, improve the credibility of television shows, which has been questioned everywhere lately. Just a thought!

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