Empty chairs and no Plan A

The good news about the joint opposition party’s gathering in Lahore on 17^th January is that it passed off peacefully despite having disrupted the lives of countless thousands of people. It took 6,500 policemen to run the three layers of security, backed up by paramilitary Rangers and rooftop snipers. All the police at the rally/LEA interface were unarmed, suggesting that lessons have been learned somewhere. One might wonder whether the organisers of the rally were going to pay for the security that their actions had necessitated. Attendance fluctuated throughout the two-part display of something a little less than unity between the parties represented on the platform, reaching a peak when the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was on stage. Television coverage throughout revealed an oversupply of chairs and an undersupply of those who were to fill them.

There was another missing component — any coherent plan or common strategy presented to the attendees as to how the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) was going to be unseated. Instead we had the tedious spectacle of parliament being cursed by all and sundry, the joint leader of the PPP making something of a fool of himself by declaring that he could bring the government down any time he liked (he cannot) and Messrs Sheikh Rashid and Imran Khan both announcing their likely imminent resignation from the legislature for reasons as clear as mud.

This was a gathering with all the resonance of a cracked bell. There was no strategy to oust the PML-N. The PAT chairman, here on holiday from his home in Canada, announced that there was to be a meeting ‘in the next few days’ to finalise a plan for future protest strategy but no mention of strategy formulation. And everybody had been there before. There was not the slightest indication that this event and the leaders present presented any threat to the government. Any ‘charter of demands’ that may be cobbled together can be safely ignored as have all the other demands made in The Day of the Dharna. Government 1, Protesters 0. Date for a rematch unannounced.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2018.

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