From intimidating accountability watchdogs, telling the judiciary how to do its job, to placing increasingly fascist restrictions on press, Imran Khan has reached levels of desperation that seem unprecedented
We have been here before. A government, drunk on its newfound power, now finds itself in unfamiliar territory where it has to lead a nation and not just tear down all that holds that country upright.
An opposition, being oppressed, harassed and victimised for speaking to the aspirations of the people, at whose will, it serves. It’s not new. It’s a vicious cycle that has revisited this country one too many times now.
The 2018 general election was among the most tainted in this country’s history, the impact of which the nation now suffers. The country is in the grip of an economic crisis that can only be described as a financial Armageddon, corruption is ironically at its peak, a glimpse of which has been seen in the recent report put forth by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on the Peshawar BRT project.
In the Prime Minister’s (PM) House, our own version of the Mad King has begun to unravel. In an attempt to distract everyone from how the country’s economy has continued to unravel under his watch, he has decided to demolish every institution we hold dear in the country.
From threatening and intimidating the country’s accountability watchdogs, telling the judiciary how to do its job, to placing increasingly fascist restrictions on the press in Pakistan, Imran Khan has reached levels of desperation that seem unprecedented.
Why though? Why this sudden surge in desperation on the part of the PM?
Nawaz Sharif has been unfairly put behind bars. The top tier leadership of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) is being threatened day in day out with mala fide cases in an attempt to shut them up.
Why is the government so spooked that it continues to up the ante and show its ill intent when despite its reservations and grievances over the election process, the opposition has on various occasions declared its intentions to let the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) remain in power and complete its term?
What perturbs the government is that it can see the writing on the wall. Going forward, electoral politics will revolve around the next generation of voters — the youth — and at present, no one has shown to connect with the youth of this country quite like Maryam Nawaz.
People know her as the current force that has kept the party going in her father’s absence, but what people do not realise is that she has been there for quite some time now.
When Nawaz was in exile during Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf-led military rule, it was Maryam who pushed and encouraged her father to return to the country because she believed the people needed her father’s leadership. Now she is burdened with the responsibility to fight for her family and her party.
She has been burdened with the responsibility to fight for all of us… for the very democratic soul of the country.
The Mad King fears his government will fall apart once and for all as his false claim of representing the youth nears collapse. It is for this very reason that his government is going to ridiculous lengths to try and harass the opposition.
What he needs to remember is that we have been here before. And inevitable is that authoritarians have time and time again fallen from their positions of power and been forced to feel the unforgiving wrath of the will of the people.
That wave, let’s call it a tsunami, is building up, making its way to sweeping away the PTI government and its politics.
Any author’s views do not reflect that of The Current
