Imran Khan’s greatest failure, editorial Daily times
Pakistan
has had both vicious and stupid rulers, but God save us from some
combination of the two. With his homicidal statements, Imran Khan is proving to
be just like the Taliban he apparently admires. At his latest rally in
Bahawalpur on Friday, Khan threatened the government with a ‘million man’ march
on the capital if his ‘demands’ are not met.
Cashing
in on the scandal caused by the Punjab police last week, he said that if the
police mistreated or shot at his supporters in the march, he would “hang them
with his own hands”.
Accompanying
this murderous threat, he listed four ‘demands’:
why
did Nawaz Sharif make a victory speech on the night of May 11, when election
results were unconfirmed; who are the returning officers responsible to; what
role did Najam Sethi play in election rigging, and last but not least, what
role did former Supreme Court Chief Justice (CJ) Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry
play in manipulating the results of the elections.
The
latter two accusations (not demands) are in fact serious enough for the named
parties to respond with defamation suits against Khan since he has not provided
a shred of evidence to support his claims.
The only word left to describe Mr Khan now is ‘a petulant child’, a sad comedown from the hopeful days of last May. Evidence of his mental instability is overwhelming. It is a criminal offence to threaten to hang people, even the police! It is absurd pointing to Nawaz Sharif’s speech as proof that rigging occurred.
Furthermore,
in what can only be described as scraping the bottom of the barrel, Imran is
also blatantly dishonest about the contents of the speech in which Sharif said,
“Results are still coming in, but this much is confirmed we are the single
largest party so far.”
Al
Jazeera reported on the night of May 11 that the PML-N was leading in 119 of
272 National Assembly seats. If confronted with this, Imran will probably say
that Al Jazeera was also part of the rigging conspiracy! The fact is that by
the night of May 11, the trends were relatively clear and the PML-N did not
announce a victory, but expected one.
Imran
conceded defeat himself and congratulated Nawaz Sharif by the night of May 12.
If he was so convinced his party was robbed, why did he acknowledge the results
of the election or form the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) (a question
he avoids)? One could also ask Khan why on the night of May 11, Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaaf workers from Rawalpindi were celebrating their victory in KP
when they clashed with police and the incident was covered by the press.
Following Imran’s logic, were his own workers part of a rigging plot? These
holes in his argument more than imply that his current posture is driven by
overweening ambition rather than principle.
The Khan rhetoric on display in
Bahawalpur verged on the insane. Claiming that all opposition parties think the
election was rigged, Khan has missed the fact that no other opposition party is
with him. His threat to the police is criminal. It is not acceptable from the
leader of a political party. However, Khan does not care what anyone thinks and
he does not care about the country; he is convinced of his own rightness and
willing to let the country suffer to prove it. He is too committed to this
course of action now for any good sense to penetrate the egotism guiding his
actions. The country is fighting a war, but one he does not believe in, and so
he is willing to sacrifice its future to be proved right, and the devil take
the facts or ground realities. Khan may take himself down, that is his right,
but his current course could take innocent people down with him too, and that
is unacceptable. Wake up Imran Khan, the country is in a tough situation and the
need of the hour is clarity. Instead of spending on futile expensive rallies
and stretching the resources of the state in protecting him and his supporters,
Imran should work for the welfare of the people of KP who elected his party.
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