Dr. Syed Rifaat Hussain

Shifting dynamics of Pakistani politics

The shifting dynamics of Pakistani politics concerning the no-confidence move, barring some incident of violence against PM Imran Khan, is soon to reach its final destination. Whether Imran Khan would be ousted from power after three and a half years or not is a question that will soon be answered. But Imran Khan remains tenacious in his belief that some miracle will happen and his impending fall power will not happen. In fact, he has called upon PTI supporters to come out to defeat his opponents in their plans to oust him as the Prime Minister.

This is delusionary thinking. And the arithmetic of numbers of united opposition votes does not support it – the opposition needs only 172 votes to unseat Imran Khan while it claims that it has 199 votes in its kitty and only a “miracle” can change this number.

To make things worse, PTI has suffered attrition in its ranks: Jehangir Tareen has at least a group of thirty rebellious MNAs and Mr. Aleem Khan is leading a powerful group of dissident members from Punjab. Without the support of these two powerful groups, PTI cannot remain a cohesive and dynamic political party.

Imran Khan’s demise as a political leader is a tragic story of arrogance, faulty judgments, failure to show flexibility when needed the most and, above-all, his predilection to see the world in Manichean terms as good and evil. Imran Khan has looked at himself as entitled to rule Pakistan. When he was sworn in as PM in August 2018, he entertained the erroneous belief that PTI was the best thing that had happened to Pakistan and he would make Pakistan a great country by eliminating corruption from body politics of the country. He blithely ignored the fact that more than half of his Cabinet members hailed from those very mafias that he was waging a war to create corruption free society.

The second cardinal mistake that he made was the belief that thoughtful thinking was action. On innumerable occasions, he told the nation not to worry because their leadership is in safe and incorruptible hands. It did not matter to him when the empirical data suggested otherwise.

The Transparent International in its last report suggested “corruption had actually increased in Pakistan instead of going down.” This upward trend was simply denied by PTI ministers and Transparency International was accused of being biased against the PTI government. With the result that no corrective measures were taken by them against corrupt practices.

By playing fast and loose with data, manipulating facts to their advantage and by constructing a false narratives about key national issues, PTI government tried to create a false perception that all was well under their rule. People’s complaints about crushing burden of rising prices of staple items like sugar, wheat, oil were attributed to worldwide inflation and not to internal fiscal mismanagement. Similarly, the crushing debt burden was attributed to inflationary pressures induced by “external factors” without offering any reasonable explanation of blind borrowing by the government. Pakistan changed half a dozen finance minsters during three and a half years of PTI’s financial governance.

The reliance on manipulation and half-truths was most evident during the so called letter gate scandal. In his March 27 rally in Islamabad, PM Imran Khan pulled out a letter from his pocket and brandishing it to his supporters claimed that the letter contained elements of an international conspiracy to destabilize his government. The next day, Mr. Asad Umar accused Mian Nawaz Sharif of being directly involved in this international conspiracy. He further accused PML (N) of receiving money from abroad to finance this conspiracy. Two days later, PM Imran Khan shared a summary of the contents of the letter with selected media persons.

Under pressure from public, media and political leaders for full disclosure, the government called a National Security Committee to discuss the issue of the so-called letter. The meeting lasted for less than an hour and decided to launch a strong protest with the U.S. government. The acting American Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) was called to the Foreign Office the next day and handed over a démarche protesting involvement of Washington in Pakistan’s internal affairs. Both the White House and State Department denied these assertions by Islamabad as devoid of any truth.

A few things are obvious from this episode which was blown out of proportion by the PM to gain deep sympathy of PTI supporters. One, the so-called letter was not a letter, but was actually an internal classified cable sent by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S. Two, to the extent we know, the cable did have strong language, but contains nothing that could be remotely characterized as “international conspiracy”. Three, U.S. officials have denied any role in Pakistan’s domestic politics.

As the foregoing suggests, PM Imran Khan would go to any length to retain power. PTI has been pedaling the theory that PM Imran Khan’s life is under threat and therefore that the entire nation needs to rally around him. One of the PTI supporters has petitioned the Supreme Court of Pakistan to intervene and postpone the final count of the vote. The registrar of the Supreme Court has sent back the petition filed on frivolous grounds.

Imran Khan had expected that the issue of “letter gate” would offer him a ray of hope to turn around the impossible situation in which he finds himself. Barring some “miracle happening”, including the real possibility of large-scale violence by PTI supporters, PM Imran Khan should get ready to leave his office following the success of vote of no-confidence move against him.