Pakistan: PTI’s men of honour

In walked Shah Mehmood Qureshi to the very institution his party has denounced as illegitimate and corrupt and which his leader Imran Khan has been abusing from atop his container. As the PM and the interior minister walked away, Qureshi delivered a speech so laden with hypocrisy that it made many cringe. Remarkably, he insisted his party had never attempted to harm parliament and was in fact out to defend it, denying there was any other agenda, any script written by hidden hands and handed to the PTI and PAT. It must have taken a considerable degree of shamelessness on Qureshi’s part to do so, but he had to run this errand. He spoke of the sanctity of parliament, its lawns, its land and his respect for these. He only exposed himself and Imran Khan further by giving away the real ‘code of honour’ the PTI leadership lives by: that whatever is said outside parliament is just words and verbosity. We wonder how this should be taken by those PTI supporters – men, women and children – who have been misled, exploited and endangered by the words and verbosity of the proponents of ‘Naya’ Pakistan. In a stunning display of hypocrisy and double-talk, Qureshi claimed that he could only advise the crowds, not command them, and then in the next breath said PTI marchers had nothing to do with the violence that had occurred. He blamed the PTV headquarters attack on the PAT, ostensibly throwing Tahirul Qadri under the bus.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi and the other PTI MNAs who had submitted their resignations, were, according to Imran Khan, supposed to appear at the joint sitting of parliament for the last time to lay out their case. It did not quite work out that way. In the manner of Mark Antony coming to bury Caesar rather than praise him, Qureshi hoped to win over lost PTI support, made his speech and walked out before any of the PTI members could have their resignations accepted. This tactic should not work. Walking out of parliament before anyone could confront them, he and his fellow MNAs managed to avoid Mehmood Khan Achakzai’s proposal to pass a resolution condemning the attacks on parliament and PTV and getting the PTI MNAs to sign it. Avoiding responsibility has been a hallmark of the PTI since day one of the march and Qureshi and the rest of the MNAs merely played to type. It is highly telling that the only PTI MNA to have really and openly followed the original instructions to resign so far is Javed Hashmi – the one who dared defy Imran and expose his real intentions.

Even as the ‘political jigra’ tries to hash out a political settlement – something Qureshi claimed to support in his speech – Imran is still insisting on Nawaz’s resignation. What now remains to be seen is if the PTI and PAT drift apart as talks continue with Imran’s men or if a more comprehensive solution can be found. We have already seen enough to know that both Qureshi and his leader cannot be trusted. He may have, in what can be seen as an admission of defeat, said that the PTI wants a negotiated solution. But Qureshi and his fellow men’s real standing in Imran Khan’s eyes, and how they can so easily be overruled and used by Imran Khan’s megalomania is now sufficiently known. Until such an agreement is in place and adhered to, Islamabad should continue to be alarmed. Still, the triumphant cries from just days ago to march towards the PM’s house seem to have been forgotten. An agreement there has to be, but there will be little now that the PTI can hold up as a sign of success – even for face-saving. The feeble cries that ‘awareness’ has been raised leaves us incredulous. Awareness about what? How not to lead a party? How to lie? How to incite a mob and worship chaos? How to invite the army to make order out of chaos? Yet, for all the humiliation they have suffered, the PTI may be marginally better off than Tahirul Qadri. Though he made some attempts to soldier on his body language gives him away. His cape droops, his shoulders sag and no one pays him much heed at all. He has already asked supporters who wish to leave to go home. We hope the attention should soon shift to clearing up the debris left behind by the marchers in Islamabad.