Daily Times

Wouldn’t it have been wiser, as repeatedly suggested in this space, if our political leadership hadn’t resorted to calling each other traitors and agents of India, etc? Now they can’t stop the military from getting dragged into the political mess if they wanted to. And all one really needs to do is watch any Indian news channel, or clippings on social media, to see how they are having a field day across the border because our political elite, the lot we trust the future of our country with, cannot take two words of dissent without playing the India card. The wider debate has very quickly mutated too and now the government and the combined opposition are accusing each other of throwing more dirt on one of the country’s most respected institutions.

This, then, is the fruit of not breaking bad old habits. And it’s not as if they weren’t warned. Anybody who has covered Pakistani politics for even the briefest of times advised staying well clear of such a course. Yet no sooner had Nawaz Sharif opened the Pandora’s Box during the Gujranwala rally than the government, the prime minister no less, snapped out the “Indian agent” charge. The opposition was well within its rights to protests even though whether or not the former prime minister was justified in naming names the way he did is a debate for another time. The point is that even though he did, the government should have reacted differently.

The government feels frustrated no doubt because of its own ability to control prices of essential items and the thought that inflation might push ordinary people to join the protests, just because it would provide them with a platform to criticise the ruling party, is clearly weighing very heavily upon it. Onlookers, especially those with stakes in the economy, now feel that the government should take the first step towards diffusing this volatile situation and offer talks to the opposition. But the government is clearly in no mood to do so. That means, most likely, that what has already become a bad situation is going to become worse. Hopefully, going forward, politicians will keep their discourse civil and not associate the representative of the Pakistani people with the hostile neighbouring country. *