Daily Times

How typical of this prime minister to try and deflect attention from all that is going wrong by taking refuge under the holy banner of Riyasat-e-Madina. Just when people were expecting a sense of direction from him because they are about to be overrun by yet another wave of high inflation stemming from the mini-budget, and even his party leaders are lining up to question his style of governance, he’s responded by writing an op-ed column about the glory of Madina and pretended to be the modern-day leader behind the resurrection of its ideals.

No surprise, then, that his article did not touch at all upon the fact that out-of-control prices, especially in edible items with very inelastic demand, witch-hunt in the name of accountability, and a completely dictatorial style of governance form a society that is the farthest thing from the state of Madina. If anything, PML-N spokesperson Mariyam Aurangzeb hit the nail on the head when she explained that Imran Khan talking about Madina, especially at this time, is like a thief taking refuge in a mosque just when his crime is about to be uncovered.

Perhaps the PM should have started his column by explaining just why, if he has really ushered in the state-of-Madina-revolution, are his own party members beginning to agitate against him. Was Pervez Khattak, for example, supposed to believe that the gas shortage and inflation problems he mentioned to the PM just before the vote on the mini-budget and SBP amendment bill amounted in fact to the high price that must be paid for laying the foundation of a Madina-like state in Pakistan? Or did MNA Noor Alam Khan just forget that his leader was different from others even though he’s been doing exactly what he’s been hounding others about because he’s the one true deliverer who will eventually make all the pain go away and establish a Muslim welfare state in its true sense?

We feel embarrassed when the person supposed to represent the whole country leans on religion to hide his sheer incompetence.

Or are the people simply supposed to live with out-of-control inflation just because Imran Khan talks about the glory of Islam whenever he’s confronted about the abject failure of his policies? The PM should understand by now that simply hiding behind politically correct, sharia-compliant arguments is no longer going to force people to look the other way and give him more time. They’ve already started venting their anger every time they get a chance to vote. Yet rather than learning a lesson and adjusting policies accordingly, PTI bigwigs smell a conspiracy in everything and take to their trademark sense of denial, just before blaming the opposition for the problems and spinning their own incompetence and corruption into some sort of religious crusade.

The Pakistani people have had enough of this charade. Many of us are honourable, practicing Muslims and feel embarrassed as well as insulted when the person supposed to represent the whole country leans on religion to hide, even justify his own sheer incompetence. It’s bad enough for everybody to suffer for a political experiment gone horribly wrong. But it’s much worse to tell the people that they are much better off now than before just because one man says so. And there’s also the impression, of course, that disagreeing with this theme would amount to disagreeing with the principles of the state of Madina itself.

This is a shameful show of ignorance. But, as they say, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but never all the people all the time. The Pakistani people have already started seeing through the ruling party’s self-righteous, self-serving religiosity and demand a return to the system that was much closer to the ideals of our great religion. And now that the chips have started to fall in place, their day of deliverance is not very far.

The writer is a LUMS graduate and currently serves as PMLN MPA. She is a close aide of Maryam Nawaz and tweets at @hinaparvezbutt