A whole new world

Politicians, conventional, new breed, and those espousing modern sentiment, pay heed; it will not be business as usual

Three events in the last week must be paid attention to: the PIA affair, where former minister Rehman Malik and a PML-N representative, Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, were forced to leave the aircraft by the passengers for unnecessarily delaying their flight awaiting the arrival of the two VIPs. Truly, the list of culprits in such an event has to be far more elaborate than just the two politicians, but it will always be noted as a landmark event.

Why did the airline management accede to such a diabolic request? How could a flight plan be changed on the spur of the moment without regard to the rights of the remaining passengers as well as the rules that govern air traffic? But that is how we have been functioning to date; delaying flights, accommodating VIPs, closing routes and denying the people their basic human and civil rights. As Rehman Malik and Ramesh Kumar will tell you, you can’t do that anymore. And that is good.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, as a part of his duty, has been visiting flood victims all over, and as a part of the drill has been addressing the affected people marooned on dykes, bunds and in refugee camps. He has met people’s anger at practically all places with slogans and chants that are more likely to emerge from the D-Chowk in Islamabad. People in earlier such experiences were mostly docile, facile and listless, clapping to the tune of their masters and hoping in vain that their seasonal losses may just be made up as promised by the stream of politicians paying them their perfunctory visits. Anger, instead, as a response to the presence of the political leadership in their midst is unusual.

Thirdly, Imran Khan’s followers were detained in significant numbers by the Islamabad police to crack-down on those who have now occupied Islamabad’s main square for more than five weeks and are likely to extend their self-invitation far beyond. The Islamabad administration is devoid of ideas on how to manage this debilitating nuisance resorts to sporadic spurts of action that border on lunacy. They resort to avenues like Section 144 and contrived charges to scare people away from such assembly.

Such actions are not only transparently foolish and misplaced, their contrived legality gets thrown out the next morning by the courts for simply being trumped up. The biggest contradiction in the land of Section 144, which prohibits assembly of people beyond five, is the assembly of thousands that inhabit the D-Chowk; permanently now. PTI ‘Tigers’ and PAT ‘activists’ have then gone on and raided the police stations where their people were kept in custody and broken the cells freeing them from the police. This is lawlessness, vigilantism at its worst and very dangerous. People seem to have lost the fear of state apparatus and the laws under which they operate and have no compunction in taking laws into their own hands. This is bad and its responsibility lies with the two leaders who rule over their will in the D-Chowk. To a state this must be the most worrisome trend that reflects a loss of its writ right in the middle of the capital.

The divide is stark — you are with them (the dharna crowds) or against them. The last time someone said this, Pakistan was pushed back by 20 years, back to 1979.This time it may drop back by 40 or 50 years. There is no middle ground. There is no space for a middle ground. The government has given up; it has no ideas. Only Sirajul Haq of the JI continues to knock his head about; what he finds though standing against him are the two walls. Perhaps, a drop scene will emerge; perhaps, someone will force it on all sides; but, it will end, one day. Our only hope is that it ends without bloodshed as we don’t have space for more. Divinity again has another chance; though the consequences mostly of such intervention are horrendous and almost always unmanageable.

The political landscape has unmistakably changed. One wonders if someone is paying attention to it. One, the people have learnt that they have rights, and they are willing to fight for them; even take law into their own hands to win them back. Two, they have realised that democracy is more than simply electing the ‘electables’. That democracy is a two-way street. And in this compact, there is the second part of the equation where the elected are supposed to return the favour to their electors by governing them according to the law and the Constitution; and make policies centered round the people, that must keep the people’s interests primary and make them — their society and the state — strong. Anyone not doing so is cheating them out of a political contract. Politicians, conventional, the new breed, and those espousing modern sentiment, please pay heed; it will not be business as usual. Any of them neglecting this will do so only at his peril.

But then, what the two dharna leaders are leading their obsessed followers into is as much conventional politics with an end to assume power on the back of an aroused sentiment that has formed their ‘power’. Their work is a mix of altruistic rendition of the wrongs that people at large have undergone through the decades, and the possibility that power just might be in their reach, just across the D-Chowk. Forgetting entirely that even if inducted into power there still will be an opposition, a parliamentary structure more or less still composed of the same politicians that they aim to oust, and a constitutional framework, as it stands, to work within. Wholesome replacement is neither practical nor probable. System improvements instead will deliver rather than the change of faces alone.

In strategy, the understanding of the point of maximum advantage is essential to exploit for maximum returns. If one misses it or foolhardily presses beyond that moment, the law of diminishing returns takes over, exhausting both an aggressor’s power capacity and the intended advantage at the same time. That moment in these two dharnas was passed a long while back. It is true that the present government, too, is fatally injured in this face-off, but having lost his leveraging moment Imran, too, will not be the victor. This is not a revolution. This is a political movement. Movements are long and bring in incremental changes.

Imran has been the catalyst for change but he will still need the implementing mechanism. Those will emerge from the bigger players; either in coalition or through cooption. The bigger players also will need to change to remain relevant. This is a whole new world; and we better learn to live in it.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2014.

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