Four Reasons that Turned a Voter into a Critic

I was two years old when Pak­istan had won the crick­et World Cup in 1992. Undoubt­ed­ly, Imran Khan was the cen­ter of atten­tion for that remark­able tri­umph and with the pas­sage of time, my devo­tion for Imran Khan grad­u­al­ly increased. Even when I was a kid, I was enthralled by Kaptaan’s charis­mat­ic per­son­al­i­ty. I wished him to lead our nation in the same way he led our crick­et team in the World Cup. By 2012, he had achieved unprece­dent­ed fame and pop­u­lar­i­ty in the polit­i­cal cir­cles. I still remem­ber the his­toric jal­sa at Minar-i-Pak­istan which attract­ed mas­sive crowd from all over Pak­istan. That was a turn­ing point for his pol­i­tick­ing. Sub­se­quent­ly, I had made up my mind to vote for Khan in the May 2013 elec­tions. Being his sup­port­er, I was expect­ing that he will deliv­er what he had promised but things went in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Khan did not only dis­ap­point me but his cur­rent per­for­mance and atti­tude forced me to regret why I vot­ed for him and com­pelled me to join the camp of his crit­ics. How­ev­er I do under­stand that one year may be too short to eval­u­ate his per­for­mance and inten­tions. But it is impor­tant to high­light the major rea­sons which are turn­ing a sup­port­er like me into a crit­ic.

Mer­i­toc­ra­cy ver­sus Elit­ism
Youth con­sti­tutes major­i­ty of the country’s pop­u­la­tion. Arguably, youth is now more inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics and polit­i­cal­ly con­scious than ever due to social media and oth­er fac­tors. It was his promis­es of pre­fer­ring mer­i­toc­ra­cy over elit­ism and nepo­tism plus pro­vid­ing the youth a plat­form to do some­thing for the coun­try which brought couch pota­toes on the roads with some vague sense of change. How­ev­er one can see that indeed peo­ple like Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Jahangir Tareen, Per­vez Khat­tak, Shireen Mazari are few of the ‘youth­ful’ promi­nent mem­bers of PTI who are hold­ing all impor­tant posi­tions of the par­ty.

It is true that PTI has some par­lia­men­tar­i­ans who are young but party’s lead­er­ship and cen­tral com­mand is pre­dom­i­nant­ly still the pre­rog­a­tive of the elite.

Coali­tion with Jamaat-i-Isla­mi (JI)
Form­ing coali­tion in democ­ra­cy is com­mon and at times cru­cial. It also paves the way for max­i­mum par­tic­i­pa­tion in leg­is­la­tion. As far as Khan’s agen­da is con­cerned, he lucid­ly used to vow that he will not form coali­tion with those par­ties which have played their role in country’s dete­ri­o­ra­tion. JI has always been the lead­ing actor in reli­gious­ly rad­i­cal­iz­ing our soci­ety and espe­cial­ly under the Zia’s regime it has pop­u­lar­ized a vio­lent and strict ver­sion of Islam. Khan has always main­tained that Pak­istan is fight­ing the US’s war in Afghanistan. How­ev­er in the late 1970s, inter­est­ing­ly, JI, PTI’s cur­rent coali­tion part­ner, was one of the key pro­po­nents of Afghan War which was also led by the US with sup­port from Sau­di Ara­bia and Israel. More­over he remained silent when for­mer JI chief Munaw­er Hasan called Hakeemul­lah Mehsud, mur­der­er of thou­sands of peo­ple, a mar­tyr while our sol­diers who give their lives for our moth­er­land, are not mar­tyrs.

From Imran Khan to Tal­iban Khan
Over 50,000 peo­ple have lost their lives in this ongo­ing war. Ruth­less Tehrik-i-Tal­iban (TTP) has launched enor­mous attacks through­out our coun­try and took respon­si­bil­i­ties. Rather than tak­ing strict stance against TTP, Khan offered TTP to open an office and called them our broth­ers. These bar­bar­ic lunatics are not our broth­ers for sure.

A threat to democ­ra­cy
The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, democ­ra­cy is all about evo­lu­tion. If we look at Europe which is home to the world’s most sta­ble, pros­per­ous and suc­cess­ful democ­ra­cies, we may real­ize that the demo­c­ra­t­ic evo­lu­tion in those coun­tries took cen­turies and resul­tant­ly made them great nations and states. Unfor­tu­nate­ly here in Pak­istan dic­ta­tor­ship has plagued our polit­i­cal his­to­ry. As a result our insti­tu­tions remained weak and dis­man­tled. One can­not deny the fact that last gen­er­al elec­tions were affect­ed by rig­ging and it has been hap­pen­ing almost in every elec­tion due to insti­tu­tion­al weak­ness­es. But sieg­ing the cap­i­tal and oth­er cities in the name of protests is not the solu­tion. The only solu­tion one can sug­gest is con­ti­nu­ity of democ­ra­cy which will ulti­mate­ly strength­en demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions.

Protest is a demo­c­ra­t­ic right of every cit­i­zen and nobody can take away the demo­c­ra­t­ic right of any indi­vid­ual but if a protest is meant to derail democ­ra­cy then it can no more enjoy our blan­ket sup­port. It is being dis­cussed that these series of protests, start­ing from 11th May, can have a neg­a­tive effect on the con­ti­nu­ity of the democ­ra­cy and if it hap­pens, Khan will push this coun­try back to the dark ages i.e. dic­ta­tor­ship.