Though Sheikh Rasheed’s Awami Muslim League is perhaps the smallest active political party, it has served the purpose. The party helped Rasheed ascend to the enviable slot of the Interior Minister, the position Rasheed bargained for in return for helping the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI) in the 2018 general elections. After the elections, he kept on writhing in agony while running the Railways for initial two years, until he found his dream job in December 2020.
Popularly known as ‘Pindi Boy’, Rasheed has advertently made all efforts to popularize Gate Number Four of the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi. He proudly presents himself as the recipient of political favours that the gate doled out. He is of the firm opinion that politics in Pakistan sags without the lift offered by the gate.
During the closing days of the PTI’s government, before the joint opposition instigated the no-confidence move, Rasheed was found advising the PTI’s leadership repeatedly to dissolve the National Assembly and call fresh elections. No one from the PTI’s higher ranks paid heed to his advice. Precious time was squandered in dillydallying. Once the move was tabled, the time to dissolve the assemblies was over. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that Rasheed had done his job, but he could not save the government from collapse under the weight of its own indecisiveness.
Perhaps, the PTI’s leadership was overly confident of the clandestine help which Gate Number Four would extend at the eleventh hour, as it did before, as a duty to protect the government from the tumble. The expectation was despite the fact that political discords were the writing on the wall. Fed on the anti-corruption sloganeering, the ruling artificial construct was falling apart owing to inefficiency and incapacity. Political dissociations were looming both in the Punjab and at the Centre.
This was also despite the fact that all clues had been pointing at the neutrality of the gate. Only the PTI’s leadership was oblivious of surroundings and happenings. The party threw itself headlong into the brewing crisis, without fathoming that the so-called hybrid experiment had failed. The scientists had wrapped up their instruments. The joint opposition was upping the ante. The time was running out. The gate intuited failure, and decided to withdraw its tentacles. To the utter surprise and infuriation of the PTI’s leadership, the higher judiciary also shrank to its core.
Sheikh Rasheed’s usual sycophantic intonation proclaiming Gate Number Four as the spring of political upheavals has invited attention of all, including the PTI’s keyboard stalwarts, who are trying to show themselves a matching generation to the mischiefs of the gate
Nothing could be saved or recouped. All political capital was lost. This was how the PTI entered into the next phase of political survival: rustle up the foreign conspiracy case. Fuel anti-Americanism and then exploit it to the party’s favour. Make the ignorance of the masses bliss for the party. Revel in the delight. The pliability of benighted minds is the victim. Politics boils down to sheer gimmickry.
The scheme saw daylight. Nevertheless, the gimmick finally worked, offering the PTI a moment of rebirth. The price of faltering in dissolving assemblies was paid by making some extra effort. In the past three months, the PTI has significantly recovered from its earlier depression verging on obscurity. Shifting gradually from foreign conspiracy, now the chant is tossing corruption allegations on the opponents– a throwback to the 2018 general elections.
The PTI has been trying to regain the lost opportunity. Politely and coercively, the party has been appealing to Gate Number Four to roll out the political chessboard once again and offer the party another chance to compensate for its losses. That is, if given a chance, the party can run the government better than before. There was room for improvement, the PTI’s leadership has finally acknowledged. The party wants the gate to set conditions for cooperation once again.
However, there is another school of thought, which says that if the PTI’s leadership had dissolved assemblies before the opposition could initiate the no-confidence move, the country would have been in grave trouble economically. The major challenger would have been the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which could not issue a bail-out package on the assurances of any ensuing interim government.
In such a scenario, Gate Number Four had to shoulder a huge responsibility. The gate had to manage the country economically to avoid an accusing finger of the masses pointed at it for running the hybrid regime show since 2018. The gate narrowly escaped the challenge.
Pakistan is now under the IMF’s thumb. Political makes or breaks and political gains or losses predicate on the IMF’s conditions. Pakistan’s economy is still paying the cost of the sudden shift in the economic policy run by Asad Umar, the PTI’s economic wizard, in the first eight months of the party’s government. The nosedive prevented the country from launching big projects, especially developmental ones. Economic downturn forced the dollar to flee the country. Economic uncertainty precluded foreign investment even from expatriate Pakistanis.
The rest of the harm was wreaked by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) which is now fighting the war of credibility– both legal and moral. The story of Tayyaba Farooq Gul, a victim of sexual harassment, is a slap in the face of the NAB which saw no voice raised from inside against the highhandedness. All women protection bills foundered on the office of NAB Chairman, Mr Justice (retired) Javed Iqbal, who stooped low while on the pedestal of integrity.
There was no internal mechanism to rectify the ill. The NAB is surviving with this malady.
The tragedy is that the NAB’s said Chairman had earned an MA in Islamic Law at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Even the knowledge of jurisprudence in Islamic Fiqah and Sharia laws, which he obtained in 1987, failed to edify his character. The student must have struggled a lot to dissociate himself from the knowledge he was learning to advance his legal career.
In short, Sheikh Rasheed’s usual sycophantic intonation proclaiming Gate Number Four as the spring of political upheavals has invited attention of all, including the PTI’s keyboard stalwarts, who are trying to show themselves a matching generation to the mischiefs of the gate.
