PTI workers’
‘revolt’
The PTI angry
workers from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been staging a sit-in at party
leader Imran Khan’s Bani Gala residence since the party’s announcement of
tickets for the upcoming general elections. Their complaint is that committed
workers who have struggled for the party’s success for years have been ignored
in favour of so-called ‘electables’. There are also demands that tickets should
be given to workers who reside in the respective constituencies and not those
from outside it, are not turncoats who have, as per their habit, switched sides
just before the elections, nor should seat adjustments be sought with the PML-Q
and Jamshed Dasti. The workers, fed on a rich diet of Imran Khan’s own rhetoric
over many years that traditional politicians are corrupt opportunists and will
be made an example of, ransacked Imran Khan’s party offices at Bani Gala on
June 18, 2018, preventing in the process Jahangir Tareen from leaving the
premises. Following the incident, Imran Khan addressed the protestors and swore
he had not awarded a single ticket to his family members or close friends and
all party decisions vis-à-vis tickets had been taken on merit. When this failed
to satisfy the agitating workers, Imran Khan asked for three days to personally
review all appeals against allegedly unfair ticket allotments. In response, the
workers said they would vacate the area after three days when Imran Khan
announces the reversal of the party’s parliamentary board decisions regarding
the candidates they object to. Amidst media reports that police manhandled the
protestors during the sit-in, the latter did not allow Arif Alvi, the party’s
Karachi leader, to enter Imran Khan’s residence and vowed not to allow any
leader in until their demands were met.
Imran Khan’s
difficulties in quelling the ‘revolt’ by his angry workers is a classic case of
being hoist by his own petard. Since forming the PTI more than two decades ago,
Imran Khan has seldom let go of any opportunity to castigate our traditional
politicians for being corrupt, opportunists, and open to many things illegal
for their own benefit. His ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric that his party would not
only reject such a political culture but change and overthrow it has now come
back with a vengeance to haunt him. The months-long sit-in he mounted in 2014
against the PML-N government gave his committed workers a taste of street
power. That lesson has now rebounded against Imran Khan. One can sympathise
with his dilemma. The PTI fought the 2013 elections with this ‘purist’
attitude. Before the polls, they were carried away by their own rhetoric,
firmly convinced they would win the elections. When the results fell far below
these exaggerated expectations, albeit a better showing than their
constituency-level support, electable candidates and the party machine to
deliver the votes on polling day seemed to indicate, the narrative switched to
alleged rigging. The sit-in followed, the rigging allegations were examined and
rejected by none other than the present caretaker Prime Minister Nasirul Mulk
who was the Chief Justice of Pakistan then, and the PTI retreated to lick its
wounds. The crisis the ruling PML-N suffered in the aftermath of the Panama
Papers resurrected the hopes of the PTI. This time the party decided to go the
traditional political route of seeking electables, even those defecting from
other parties despite unsavoury track records and characters. Naturally, there
being only a finite number of seats up for grabs in the elections, committed
workers had to be sacrificed in favour of the new entrants. All this was justified
in the PTI leadership’s mind as necessary given the expedient needs of winning
a sufficient number of seats to form a government. However, the PTI leadership
seems to have underestimated the depth of the training received over many years
from Imran Khan’s narrative. This contradiction has produced the present
impasse. If Imran Khan is able to satisfy the demands of the angry workers, the
party could once again find itself unable to reach the critical number of
seats. If he cannot, the prospect of alienated workers sitting out the campaign
could also damage the party’s prospects. Truly, Imran Khan is caught on the
horns of a self-inflicted dilemma.
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