Pakistan: Qadri and the ensuing circus

From the look of things, the PML-N government is not creating a lasting legacy for itself. It is losing itself in folds of paranoia, insecurity and bad decisions as can be seen by the latest episode to hit the Sharif government. Tahir-ul-Qadri is back in the political circuit and is up to his usual tricks. It is these antics of his that seem to be nudging the PML-N into making one bad decision after another. Showing once again that he has plenty of nuisance value, Tahir-ul-Qadri boarded a plane and made his way to what he thought was Islamabad to jumpstart a ‘revolution’ against the sitting government. However, his plane was not allowed to land in Islamabad by the federal government, citing security concerns but, even though Qadri’s supporters had stormed through the barricades erected in Islamabad’s airport, one doubts the Sharif’s genuine concern for the man’s safety. Instead, the flight was diverted to Lahore from where Qadri refused to disembark, spewing vitriol such as fearing for his life at the hands of the Sharif brothers. He stayed on board the international carrier — Emirates — for more than five hours in Lahore until his demand to be escorted out via a team of intermediaries including the governor Punjab, Chaudhry Sarwar. His first stop was Jinnah Hospital where he visited the workers of his party, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT), who were injured when the police opened fire on them outside Tahir-ul-Qadri’s residence a week ago. Needless to say, throughout this whole saga there were many protests and agitations by PAT workers in Islamabad and Lahore.

What is wrong with the PML-N? Does it not see how ill thought throuigh its reactions are? Even if the Sharif government panicked at the idea of another rally and long march by Qadri — he staged one two years ago against the PPP government — in which he may have been able to gather the support of some opposition parties, does that give it the right to divert and disrupt an entire nation’s flight schedule on any particular day? It certainly looks like the PML-N is not willing to learn any lessons from its previous mistakes. Why is the government shivering in its boots at the mere thought of this man? Such insecurity led to the tragic deaths of 11 PAT workers in Model Town last week at the hands of the police, when they shot at them at point blank range. That was the kind of move that can lead to a sitting government being dislodged. The Sharifs should know by now that Qadri is an attention seeker who makes maximalist demands and then backs down. He launched a sweeping tirade against the PPP government during his last agitation but later closed himself off in his container and accepted government conditions to back off. There was no need to panic at the shenanigans of the same man this time around. If the government is fearing that the gossip mill is true, whereby speculators are saying that the army is using Qadri to serve its own goals, Nawaz Sharif need only look around and understand that the army is stretched fighting a war against the militants in North Waziristan; it cannot concern itself with politics at the moment.

And what does one say about how this episode has affected our international image except hang one’s head in shame? Emirates, one of the few international carriers willing to regularly fly in and out of Pakistan, has threatened to discontinue its services. Cathay Pacific, the US carrier, has stopped all its flights here after the Karachi airport incident. The PML-N government’s way of ‘resolving’ issues is not doing itself, the country, its people and its image any good.