View from Pakistan: A groom, a bride and new Pakistan

Karachi: Cities have often been included in the dowry of important brides. Bombay, for example, was part of the dower taken by the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza when she married the British King Charles II in 1661.

To any eligible Pakistani woman, merely being married to Imran Khan would have been blessing enough. Imagine the thrill of having not a city but a whole country, a “New Pakistan”, included in one’s dower. It is enough to transform any commoner into a princess.

Who the bride-to-be is, only Imran Khan’s inner circle would know. He has drawn a discreet veil over her identity. He wants to wait until his “New Pakistan” has settled in before he is prepared to settle down. If he keeps his promise to his followers (and to her), and if he continues his mono-rail policy of confrontation with the Sharif brothers, this bride-in-waiting may have to cool her hennaed heels for weeks, perhaps for months, possibly even for years.

It is already a full fortnight since Imran Khan and Allama Tahirul Qadri — the twin horns of Nawaz Sharif’s dilemma — led their cohorts to a sit down outside Parliament House in Islamabad. “A week,” the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, “is a long time in politics.” By that measure, to many suffering Pakistanis, this past fortnight has seemed like an eternity.

They have watched their hapless capital hostage to two demagogues: one, a fiery cleric exhorting improved governance; the other, a passionate socialite do-gooder predicting the advent of a New Pakistan, with himself as its Prime Minister. Imran Khan’s courage cannot be questioned, nor his integrity impeached. He is audacious, persistent and uncompromising. He is also impatient, impetuous and impulsive. It is no secret that he regards himself as his own best adviser and therefore, like the lawyer who elects to defend himself, he has a fool for a client.

Posing as a modern Moses determined to convert Egypt into the Promised Land, he has refused to accept anything less than the head of the pharaoh. He may have to settle for the bitter herbs of isolation.

It has taken a talent of Imran Khan’s proportions to have alienated in the space of a fortnight almost everyone of significance in the country: the Prime Minister of the country, the chief minister of its largest province, the spectrum of parliamentary parties, his storm-ravaged electorate in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the judiciary, ex-Chief Justices, the Election Commission, the police, to name just a few of his freshly moulded enemies.

It would take courage equal to Imran Khan’s stature to admit that he could have been wrong. Winston Churchill once wrote of a similar aspirant for a prime ministership — the inflexible Lord Curzon who in 1923 saw his prize awarded instead to Stanley Baldwin — that because Curzon would not stoop, he did not conquer.

Imran Khan must have realised (as those around and beneath him already have) that his use of intransigence was perhaps not the best crowbar to prise Nawaz Sharif out of his seat. Patience brings its own rewards; impatience exacts its own penalties.

Mian Nawaz Sharif has opted to answer Imran Khan’s rhetoric with silence, defamation with decorum. He can however be faulted for his judgment: first, in defending his favourite federal minister for railways Khawaja Saad Rafique whose questionable victory in NA 125 (Imran’s Khan’s posh stronghold) triggered the present fracas; secondly, for nominating the very same Saad Rafique to conduct the parleys with Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf. Provocation could not have been more contemptuously personified.

Sooner rather than later, Tahirul Qadri’s “people’s parliament” and Imran Khan’s face-painted followers will have to return to the reality that is Pakistan. After that, all of them — leaders and the led — will have time enough to assess the brevity of their victories and the length of their failures.

Constitution Avenue will have been cleared and the organs of the federal government allowed to return to their offices. There, they will find their in-trays piled high with recurring, inescapable problems such as a tottering economy, a falling rupee, unwanted IDPs, water disputes with India, skirmishes on the LoC in Kashmir, law and order, etc., ad infinitum.

Whatever these two container-orators may or may not have learned from this avoidable episode in Pakistan’s history, Pakistan’s public is certainly better educated. It has witnessed demagoguery at its best, and worst. It has learned to be wary of TV anchorpersons peddling poisoned opinions. It has realised that the demons of our past have not been completely exorcised. And it now knows that Imran Khan (an agile 62-year-old) is getting married.

To paraphrase Cicero, no one is so old that he does not think he could be a Prime Minister once, and a bridegroom again.

By arrangement with Dawn