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What Dr Qadri has proved in Pakistan is that by bringing out a few thousand people in the streets anyone can sabotage or derail a government democratically elected by millions of people
“Dissolve the parliament, executive should resign, topple the government.” These were some of the demands of Imran Khan a year back when his PTI was in full swing and it appeared for some time that the government would collapse any moment. However, it did not. Today, a year later, Dr Tahirul Qadri and whoever is behind him are out with the exact same slogans, the same media strategy and posters at the back screen of every rickshaw where previously Imran Khan was the only face, calling for exactly the same demands to be met. Without going into the dubious and highly controversial past of Dr Qadri, I will try to make some sense out of the entire long march that has puzzled the entire world. For one, it is noticeable that the entire movement of Dr Qadri has been highly organised, systematic, and carefully choreographed, and it also hints at the fact that perhaps the people behind the movement learned a serious lesson from the mistakes that were made a year back during Khan’s movement.
To understand Dr Qadri’s long march we need to deconstruct his motives. First, it is obvious and he has also explicitly claimed from the first day that he is not here to run the elections. With his background and the controversies surrounding him, he or his handlers are not fools to think that in the age of radical media in Pakistan Dr Qadri will be spared or that he stands any chance of winning the elections. If Dr Qadri is not in it for elections, it forces me to wonder why then somebody would spend millions of rupees on a long march he has titled to be against corruption in Pakistan. Is he really moved by the situation in Pakistan or is he being played by someone else on the brutal chessboard of Pakistani politics? It is hard to believe that a person who spent the five most miserable years in the history of Pakistan sitting in Canada waiting for his citizenship would be absolutely moved by the situation back home now, and was miraculously able to organise the entire long march from abroad.
Second, the element of timing is also important. It appears that Dr Qadri or his handlers are saving him from all the blunders that Imran Khan made, especially the timing of Khan’s rallies, which undermined his entire movement because the media and the opposition had ample time to criticise and bring him down before the elections. Looking closely at Dr Qadri’s movement, we can notice that his arrival to Pakistan and his entire movement kick started in a blink of an eye without giving time or leverage for his opponents and the people to criticise him publicly. And before criticism would even start, Dr Qadri was having a dharna (sit-in) at the D-chowk in Islamabad, calling for the government to resign — a preposterous demand that he understood could not be met.
The important question that everyone had been asking was what Dr Qadri wanted and why he demanded all that he did. My explanation for that is very simple: What Dr Qadri has demanded from the government is nothing new; Imran Khan has been asking the same thing for long. However, what really seems to be happening is the fact that Dr Qadri is founding a platform and a stage for the forgotten cause of Imran Khan, will revive Khan’s lost stature and the PTI for the upcoming elections. Khan is likely to be the single biggest beneficiary of Dr Qadri’s long march, capitalising on the latter’s efforts to bring out people and monopolise media attention right before the elections. The ultimate plan of Dr Qadri was never to win the elections or topple the government; this is not how governments are toppled in Pakistan. The plan, it appears, is to bring the PTI back into the limelight and give it at least some standing before the elections. The entire long march is a show orchestrated by those political parties who realised that winning the elections through normal electoral procedure in the current setup would be impossible. Hence, the only way the PTI can actually win the elections is by taking the undemocratic route, but obviously by making it appear that it was not the PTI that took the unconstitutional or undemocratic step, but letting Dr Qadri take the forward lead and do the dirty work.
Imran Khan is keeping the right distance and closeness with Dr Qadri. While Khan has already claimed that Dr Qadri has been successful in his mission, he is not giving his all-out support to him so as not to taint his own movement. Dr Qadri has indeed done his job in bringing the government to the negotiating table where he is likely to negotiate the terms that will directly benefit Imran Khan without getting Khan dirty in the entire process.
What Dr Qadri has proved in Pakistan is that by bringing out a few thousand people in the streets, having poor women and children in the front lines of the long march, using the name of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), anyone can sabotage or derail a government democratically elected by millions of people. What we had in the past five years might be the most corrupt government in the history of Pakistan, but it was still elected by the people and that needs to be respected. Many people in Pakistan have emerged the way Dr Qadri has and that served to benefit someone else. Dr Qadri has put on a good show, but unfortunately, his future in Pakistan looks bleak. At the end of this entire fiasco, my assessment is that Dr Qadri might be packing up for Canada sooner than we all can expect since his job has been done well.
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
