Daily Times

The cat’s actually been, for all intents and purposes, out of the bag for quite a while now. Yet it took for Pervez Khattak to wash PTI’s dirty laundry at its parliamentary meeting to show just how deep the discontent runs within the ruling party. They’ve been trying to play it down since then, of course, but there’s no more hiding the fact that even very senior PTI leaders are now very unhappy with the way the PM is running the show. Some party loyalists are also trying to spin the incident into something of a win for democracy, etc, by citing how such an open disagreement with the boss could only happen in the most democratic of political parties. But doesn’t that beg the obvious question of why the PM thought he was being blackmailed by what was allegedly only an exercise in intra-party democracy?

Perhaps, the only thing new about what Khattak said to the prime minister was that somebody stated the obvious directly to the head of state; who’s otherwise seemingly pretty content with sweeping all problems under the carpet, blaming the previous government for them or, better yet, refusing to accept them altogether. For, not long before the defence minister complained about the gas shortage and pointed out that high prices were making it very difficult to launch the election campaign, wasn’t the PM saying that prices in Pakistan were among the lowest in the region and quality of life was pretty high; both of which were incorrect from the point of view of the people?

All this happened in the backdrop of the national assembly session to pass the mini-budget and the SBP amendment bill, both of which sailed without much trouble. But the same day’s news also spoke of Nepra allowing another Rs 4.30 per unit hike in the electricity tariff and expectation of an Rs 6.3 per litre rise in prices of key petroleum products on January 15. And the price impact of the mini-budget will come in the weeks and months that follow these steep increases. That’s when PTI would be on the verge of officially launching its election campaign, which would also make it the most inopportune time for party members to blame each other for the mess. No spin can change the fact that they’re already feeling the heat from their constituents, as was pretty apparent during the recent local body polls in KP, so PTI not only needs to build a narrative that accommodates inflation but also do something to make sure that its senior leaders fight for it, not against it. *