WHO'S THE 'THEY' THEY SPEAK OF?

this column was printed in the paper but was not published online.

Anyone following the trajectory of Imran Khan’s rise to prominence must wish, most arduously, that he’d settled back into a semi-private existence after retiring from cricket. He could have made occasional forays into the public eye to sign autographs and perhaps write a book or two instructing Botham and Lamb on how not to be racist, but that’s it. Instead he went on to build a Cancer Hospital. Fame is a heady experience.

The Shaukat Khanum University Hospital is a great achievement and has turned out to Imran Khan’s credit, a lifesaver for countless people who could otherwise not have afforded the care this hospital provides. But with SKUH the captain appears to have peaked, and thereafter ‘captain’ has been replaced by ‘Taliban Khan.’ Sadly, a great portion of his electorate was unable to get the charismatic captain out of their mind, and the man who refused to condemn the Taliban and insisted he would negotiate with them stood for elections, and with the support of these fans has been able to form a government in this country.

Pakistan can ill afford a man of Khan’s uninformed grasp of politics, beset as it is by itself and others. Mr. Khan thinks in terms of slogans and knee jerk reactions due to inattention to planning; he imagines the country can be run by such means, very much like the very people we most need to shake off. Such inept politics has managed to place the government on the back foot, more than at any other time. Had ‘they’ searched from this pitch to that, they would not have found as ideal a stooge to serve as front man.

It’s a moot point exactly who the ‘they’ are. The usual ‘they’ appear to have had little to say, when as Irfan Hussain points out in a major daily, they were on the blasting end recently. That is something that has never happened before. So who exactly benefits from the PMs random bouncers here, there and everywhere, and his predilection for all things right of centre?

Could it be that Pakistan has finally done what it has been trying to do since it came into being, and like the Americans given the country’s helm into the hands of someone who is holding the ship fully on course to the bottom of the sea? Will ‘they’ stand forth then, as Saviours and steer the nation towards…heaven knows what. Or is it that by allowing themselves to appear outdone ‘they’ are not actually outdone? That ‘their’ aims and the aims of Pakistan’s foul-mouthed Voldemort actual dovetail? It isn’t difficult to imagine where they converge and what one gains from the other’s success; the prospect is frightening, yet that is the most likely scenario. Because dharnas like the ones our PM set into fashion for his own ends, without a thought for the losses incurred by the nation, do not and cannot just occur. They take finances, and finances, in this country, are most of them in ‘their’ hands.

Have they overstepped their intentions though? Because since the latest three-day bout of savage violence up and down the country, the common man incurred so much loss as a result of shutdowns and road blockages that the narrative has changed with the suddenness of a game in which the team most cheered-on has been caught tampering with the ball. Or match fixing. Or threatening the umpire. Or whatever-ing in that vein. You wonder if Mr. Khan is aware that most of his die-hard fans who voted for him because “well, there is no one else after all!” or because “we need a change,” or because “he did a great job with the hospital, maybe he’ll do as well by the country,” or “lets see this ‘naya Pakistan’ he speaks of,” have since been eating their words as if there were no tomorrow. Very likely there isn’t, and if there is it won’t be pleasant.

See – and this is an important observation: nobody likes to finance their dreams themselves, and that too as brutally as people have had to do during the latest dharna, only to find that – lo and behold! Those dreams are still somewhere in the dim and uncertain future.

And also, because most people, uneducated and uninformed they may be, dislike the sort of language they heard from persons who claim to uphold the will of the Prophet (pbuh).

So, IK needs to be aware that as when a beautiful woman looks in the mirror and finds (gasp) a wrinkle on her nose, his charisma, based on much the same theme, has lost a great deal of the grip it possessed at the outset. You wonder if that is what ‘they’ wanted and he will now be cast aside as unnecessary, or was it all a big boo-boo in the general scheme of scheming? Who knows.