“‘IF suicide was not forbidden (haram) I’d go into parliament with explosives and blow it up,’ roared a charged Shehryar Afridi, a leading light of the governing PTI and the former minister of state for interior, while addressing supporters in Pashto in his Kohat constituency this week.”

Quoted above verbatim is the opening paragraph of my column three weeks ago. Events since then have demonstrated that this was not an overzealous supporter’s outpouring of love for his leader who lost the confidence of the majority of the National Assembly but a fairly widely held sentiment in the PTI.

On Saturday, former minister Fawad Chaudhry, who has served PTI, PPP and the Musharraf governments with an unabashed commitment to remaining in power, and whose friends swear by his ‘liberal’ values, tweeted thus and I quote (mistakes, omissions, caps his, not mine):

“We are inches away from full fledge Civil unrest, @ImranKhanPTI has exercised utmost restraint very soon even he won’t be able to stop this very angry mob and we ll see Country plunging into a civil unrest, imported leaders ll not be able to leave Country”

Threats such as those made by Fawad Chaudhry assumed an entirely ominous dimension.

Amidst blatant violations of the Constitution by senior members of his party who were ostensibly the guardians of the National Assembly but in the end turned out to be no more than partisan minions, Mr Chaudhry, who is currently seen as one of the closest advisers to the party leader, was also raising the spectre of ‘martial law’.

This warning of martial law and of continuing political instability that would wreak greater havoc on the country’s beleaguered economy than even his party’s mismanagement did, came against the backdrop of the no-confidence vote, which is nothing out of the ordinary in democracies.

The most recent was in the summer of 2018 when the Conservative government of Mariano Rajoy in Spain was ousted, after his key allied parties decided to abandon him, and Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was elected to office with a four-vote majority bagging 180/350. He needed 176 votes.

What happened at the National Assembly last Sunday we witnessed, while events at the PM House we didn’t — but the defiance bubble burst close to midnight and democracy prevailed as the vote of no-confidence went ahead after the Supreme Court seemed in a mood to enforce its decision.

Similar scenes were being witnessed at the Punjab Assembly this Saturday, as members said to be in a minority were not allowing the majority will to prevail, and the deputy speaker, who was ordered by the Lahore High Court to hold the chief minister’s election, was assaulted.

As these lines were being written, mayhem was prevailing in the provincial assembly hall. Neither the sergeants-at-arms nor the additional security summoned by the deputy speaker were proving to be effective at quelling members determined to physically block the public humiliation of Punjab’s Musharraf-era strongman Chaudhry Pervez Elahi.

In a strange coincidence, as I was watching the assembly fracas on television, my younger daughter who is revising her GCSEs history, ahead of her exam next month, was discussing with her mother events in the German parliament, the Reichstag in the first half of the last century.

I found the juxtaposition of the two sending a chill up my spine. Threats such as those made by Fawad Chaudhry or his leader’s warning to his dissenting legislators and even their children about facing the wrath of the people in that context assumed an entirely ominous and different dimension than that of a political statement.

But jitters at the memory of events that led up to the Holocaust and World War II soon ended. Pakistan, despite the fascistic tendencies of some major leaders, remains a democracy which, notwithstanding its imperfections, would triumph. The rule of law has to be upheld and, I suspect, will be, whatever it takes.

The PTI will be well advised to do what it does best. Organise peaceful protest rallies and take its case directly to the electorate. Peshawar and (and the makings of the) Karachi rallies have demonstrated its support among the electorate and it should try and build on it.

There are several million new voters. They are there for the taking and a former cricketing superhero will be best placed to tap into those multitudes, many of whom won’t remember the PTI mismanagement, but may buy the ‘foreign conspiracy’ and ‘imported government’ mantra, regardless of its veracity.

The pressure being built up by the PTI’s public mobilisation is already taking a toll with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif vetoing a fuel price hike despite Miftah Ismail, the man who is tipped to steer the economy, saying the subsidy is costing the country some Rs2.5 billion a day.

One understands and appreciates the concern about the upward pressure on inflation of any energy price increase as it translates into an even greater burden on the shirtless, untold millions of whom are struggling to put food on the table even once a day.

However, the government needs to tether the need to give relief to the poor with measures for deficit reduction in economic policy or Pakistan will sink deeper into the mess the subsidy created in the first place.

It is an unenvious balancing act for the incoming government as it does not have the luxury of a full term to first roll out the tough measures and then in the latter half, after economic stabilisation, start offering relief to the voters.

Independent observers would argue that nobody forced it into government. It took advantage of the change from a pro-PTI stance to what the army spokesman called an ‘apolitical’ status that enabled it to dislodge Imran Khan from office. If it turns out it does not have a game plan, it will only have itself to blame.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2022