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| Imran Khan and General Musharraf. |
During Imran Khan’s four-months-long sit-in and political
demonstrations in front of the parliament in Islamabad from August to December
2014, the allegations of election rigging and the demand for electoral reforms
were only a red herring. A question would naturally arise in the minds of
curious observers of Pakistan’s politics that what prompted Imran Khan to make
a sudden volte-face?
The stellar success of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf
(PTI) in the general elections of 2013 was anything but a pleasant surprise for
the PTI leadership. Imran Khan and his political party were accustomed to
winning only a single seat in the parliament right up to the general elections
of 2008 which the PTI boycotted.
In the parliamentary elections of 2013, however, Imran
Khan’s PTI mustered 35 National Assembly seats and completely wiped out
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province’s Pashtun nationalist party, Awami National
Party (ANP), and formed a coalition government in the province with the tacit
approval of Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), because PML-N
could easily have formed a coalition government in the province.
These facts prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the
demonstrations and protests by PTI from August to December 2014 were based on
political opportunism rather than any genuine grievances against the
government. Imran Khan came forward with a very broad and disjointed agenda:
from electoral reforms to the resignation of the prime minister to seeking
justice for the victims of the Model Town tragedy on 17 June 2014 in which 14
workers of Tahir-ul-Qadri’s Minhaj-ul-Quran were killed by the Punjab police in
Lahore.
When the government agreed to the demand for electoral
reforms, Imran Khan began insisting on the unacceptable demand of the prime
minister’s resignation; and when people and media criticized him for being
unreasonable and causing disruption to the normal functioning of the state, he
immediately occupied the high moral ground by drawing attention to the Model
Town tragedy.
Evidently, Imran Khan’s “wish list” was only a smokescreen
to hide his real motive, which was to permanently banish Nawaz Sharif and his
family from Pakistan’s politics by sending them into another decade-long exile
to Saudi Arabia with the help of Imran Khan’s patrons in Pakistan’s military
establishment.
This obstructionist politics by Imran Khan was a clever
Machiavellian strategy; he knew that he couldn’t beat Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N
through electoral process, at least in the next couple of elections. The
difference in parliamentary seats was just too big to have been easily bridged:
Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N’s 166 National Assembly seats to Imran Khan’s PTI’s 35
seats.
Some Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) stalwarts hinted during
the course of 2014 protests that the PTI was open to a military takeover for a
few years. So, if things had gotten out of hand during the street
demonstrations and the army chief had taken over, say for an year or two, and
had sent Nawaz Sharif and his family to another decade-long exile to Saudi
Arabia, the political arena would then have been wide open for Imran Khan.
Imran Khan’s PTI could then have easily competed with the
only other mainstream political party, Pakistan People’s Party’s 45 National
Assembly seats. By wheeling, dealing Imran Khan could have formed a coalition
government with the help of the defectors from Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N who would
then have joined General Musharraf’s PML-Q, which already got cozy to Imran
Khan during the 2014 protests.
Truth be told, Imran Khan’s PTI played the same spoiler role
in Pakistan’s politics which the elusive Tamarod Movement had played in Egypt
in June 2013, only an year before PTI’s demonstrations in Pakistan. Apart from
a small number of Egyptian liberals, Tamarod was mainly comprised of a few
thousand football nuts, known as “the ultras,” who claimed that they had
purportedly collected “millions” of signatures endorsing the ouster of Mohamed
Morsi of Muslim Brotherhood, who has had only an year-long stint in power in
Egypt’s more than sixty-years-long political history. By what statistical
logic, a few thousand cultist demonstrators got the right to forcefully remove
an elected prime minister who enjoyed the confidence of tens of millions of
voters?
Most Pakistanis don’t have a clue that how close Pakistan
came to yet another martial law in its turbulent history; Imran Khan’s PTI’s
demonstrations in 2014 were not spontaneous uprisings, they were cleverly
planned and choreographed by some unconstitutional forces that have a history
of subverting the constitution in Pakistan.
Those protests should be viewed in the backdrop of the
Euromaidan demonstrations of Ukraine in 2013, the Rabaa square massacre of
Egypt and the mass protests and the ensuing military coup in Thailand only a
couple of months before the announcement of street demonstrations against the
government by Imran Khan.
Apparently, the “scriptwriter” of 2014 protests first
realized the potential of PTI’s zealots to stage a sit-in when the latter
blocked NATO’s supply route in Peshawar; it must have then occurred to
Pakistan’s military establishment that Imran Khan’s PTI’s highly motivated
youth supporters were very much capable of staging months-long demonstrations
against the sitting government.
Notwithstanding, there were actually two groups of
perpetrators that carried out an assault on democracy and constitution during
the mass demonstrations against the government in 2014. Imran Khan’s PTI is a
nation-wide political party which has a mass following; however, Tahir-ul-Qadri
and his Minhaj-ul-Quran is a subversive organization which is as dangerous as the
Taliban.
The Taliban carry out subversive activities against the
state; and in the same manner, Minhaj launched a concerted assault on the
paramount institutions of the state: the Parliament, the Prime Minister House
and the Presidency.
Here, some readers might draw our attention to the Model
Town tragedy on 17 June 2014 in Lahore during the course of which 14 workers of
Minhaj-ul-Quran were killed by the Punjab police. It was a condemnable and
outrageous act and the perpetrators must be punished, but keep in mind that it
was not the first time that Tahir-ul-Qadri’s Minhaj had carried out an assault
on democracy in Pakistan.
During the course of Imran Khan’s PTI’s protests, one can
make a convenient excuse that Tahir-ul-Qadri was seeking justice for his
workers who had died in the Model Town tragedy, but what was his defense for
holding Islamabad hostage in January 2013 before the general elections of May
2013?
Those January 2013 protests and sit-in by Qadri’s
Minahj-ul-Quran had also been a carefully planned last-ditch effort by the
military establishment to delay the elections, which Nawaz Sharif was poised to
win and the military had not wanted General Musharraf’s nemesis to dictate
terms to them once again. It shows that Tahir-ul-Qadri is a habitual offender
and that Minhaj is nothing less than his private militia.
Evidently, the August to December 2014 protests were
carefully planned and choreographed. The role played by Imran Khan and PTI was
only secondary; the primary role was played by the military establishment’s
stooges: Tahir-ul-Qadri, Sheikh Rasheed, Chaudhry Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi.
Imran Khan’s PTI is a broad-based political party which
represents the urban middle class; by their very nature, such protesters are
peaceful and nonviolent. Left to his own resources, the best Imran Khan could
have done was to stage a sit-in at Aabpara Market for a few days.
Both violent charges of the demonstrators, the assault on
the Red Zone in Islamabad as well as the Prime Minister House, were led by the
Minhaj-ul-Quran workers. Those hooligans were a bunch of highly organized and
trained religious zealots who are equipped with sticks, slingshots, gas-masks,
cranes and anything short of firearms, which apparently their organizers
forbade them from using in order to keep the demonstrations legit in the eyes
of public.
The role played by Imran Khan and PTI in the assault on the
Constitution Avenue was meant only to legitimize the assault: the peaceful
protesters, women and kids, music concerts and revolutionary demagoguery,
everything added up to creating excellent optics; but the real driving force in
the assault on democracy was Tahir-ul-Qadri and his Minhaj-ul-Quran, which is a
religious-cum-personality cult comparable to the Rajavis of Iran and their
Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or the Gulenists in Turkey.
More to the point, the role played by Sheikh Rasheed during
the mass demonstrations in Islamabad should not be underestimated. It brings to
light the fact that whoever controls the constituencies of Rawalpindi and
Islamabad can bring the capital of Pakistan to a standstill.
Protesters from outside the Twin-Cities can only stage
demonstrations in front of the parliament for a few days, but the natives of
Rawalpindi and Islamabad can stage a sit-in for months in a row. Imran Khan’s
PTI had also won 6 out of 14 Punjab Assembly’s constituencies in Rawalpindi,
which played to its strength.
Notwithstanding, if we look at the numbers game in the
general elections of 2013: Imran Khan’s PTI’s 35 National Assembly seats to
Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N’s 166, an upstart party still managed to perform well; but
we must keep in mind that PTI won more than 90% of those seats in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
(KP) province.
Pakhtunkhwa, as we know, has been the worst affected
province from terrorism; the elections in Pakhtunkhwa were fought on a single
issue: Pakistan’s partnership in the American-led war on terror, which bred
resentment and reaction among the Pashtuns.
Pakhtunkhwa’s electorate gave a sweeping mandate to Imran
Khan’s PTI which stood for dialogue and political settlement with militants
against the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party which favored military
operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and which was consequently wiped out in
the elections. And Imran Khan betrayed the confidence reposed in him by the
Pashtun electorate when he endorsed the military establishment-led operation in
North Waziristan in June 2014.
Moreover, to add insult to the injury, when the
aforementioned military operation led to the displacement of millions of
Pashtun tribesmen, who have since been rotting in the refugee camps in Bannu,
Mardan and Peshawar districts; instead of catering to the needs of the refugees,
Imran Khan staged a four-months-long sit-in in Islamabad on the pretext of
alleged rigging in the 2013 general elections.
