It is not always wise to choose the lesser evil

Just because we do not want the allegedly corrupt to rule again, the mistakes of Khan cannot be justified

The emergence of PTI as a luminary party in Pakistan’s political sphere in early 2010s had indeed shifted and merged the existing poles, creating an indelible space for itself. The seesaw that was expected to be played between PPP and PML-N, like in 1990s, was skilfully destructed and the new poles that came to the fore and continue to exist can be identified as ‘Purana Pakistan politics’ and ‘Naya Pakistan politics’.

Unfortunately, in the midst of demarcating boundaries of the new poles, the nation has ceded the ability to identify all those elements which switch places, thanks to their opportunist and habitual nature. The complication does not end here: we believe that a charismatic and competent leader woke us up from a deep slumber after decades and enabled us to differentiate between right and wrong, but what we don’t realise is that we again fell asleep soon after electing him because the rights and wrongs still don’t make any sense to us.

We are a population full of hero-worshippers. Quaid-e-Azam is worshipped to date without his worshippers having even a faintest idea of the ideology he followed or tried to propagate in his life. His legacy is deemed more important than his words, a dilemma Pakistan continues to face in the age of reasoning.

Now that a prominent fraction of us has elevated Imran Khan to the status of Quaid-e-Azam, they expect the whole nation to blindly follow his lead, disregard his blunders, and have faith in his tall claims. Furthermore, all those who dare to question his policies and actions are regarded as the same as the advocates of Purana Pakistan politics. Not only is this behaviour unfair but also ignorant and condemnable.

All those who are currently finding faults in Imran Khan’s policies, let them be journalists or common people, do not necessarily belong to either PPP or PML-N. Some of them, even if few in numbers, are those who are still awake and capable of discerning right from wrong with the knowledge that two wrongs don’t make a right.

The shameless horse-trading supervised by political forces of Purana Pakistan cannot justify the hampering of implementation of the Supreme Court’s verdict.

Just because PPP and PML-N joined forces to impede any government’s constitutional right to serve for a full term, it doesn’t become legal for a serving Prime Minister to dissolve parliament in the name of “standing for the nation”.

If the Supreme Court verdict of 2017 that disqualified a corrupt PM was inch-perfect and unerring then so was 2022’s on reinstating the parliament.

Double negative can never be a sustainable option.

It is high time for PTI’s cult followers to realise that the current political scenario is not Dirilis: Ertugrul’s set, nor are we living in an Ottomon-era kingdom. This Islamic Republic is being run under a parliamentary system as dictated by the Constitution of 1973. If a leader wishes to bring reforms to how a population elects its leaders and how those leaders govern them, it cannot be done by him alone.

The biggest failure of Imran Khan in his tenure was his inability to understand how a parliamentary system works. He is no Ertugrul who could dream of becoming a lone warrior and saviour of his people. Our system, or that of any country for good measure, requires partnership. And partnership does not mean embracing and enrolling politicians from other parties or looking out for electables. It means accepting the presence of opposition benches and working with them for the betterment of people. No law can be promulgated without the Opposition sitting in the Parliament. Similarly, governments of several other countries are unable to function without the presence of a ‘shadow’ cabinet.

Just because we do not want the allegedly corrupt alliance of Purana Pakistan to rule again, the misjudgements and mistakes of Imran Khan cannot be justified. For a complete reform, our masses need to wake up, this time on their own, so that we could come out of the influence of our ‘leaders’ and decide with our own intellect and wisdom who is right for us. Choosing the lesser evil is not always the correct option; a true tabdeeli requires meticulous righteousness and calibre.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 26^th, 2022.

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