I have always believed that there is one and only one agent of change in Pakistan. The term ‘agent’ may sound harsh and if it does so, I can replace it with arbiter. What I am trying basically to say is that change in Pakistan’s political order has always taken place through the intervention of the Pakistan Army.
Some analysts and political scientists tend to cite here the example of ZAB’s PPP which took the country by storm and forced a major change in the political culture of the country. To a great extent this example is right but wasn’t it the intervention of General Yahya Khan in March 1969 that facilitated an environment in which the elections that changed both the history and the geography of Pakistan took place?
A political movement in Pakistan can go only as far as the movement spearheaded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto went.
In the current context, the political movement led heroically by Imran Khan too can be said to have come as far as it can.
Initially Imran Khan’s Tehrik-i-Insaf was regarded as an ideological movement designed to bring about a paradigm shift in the way this country is run and a revolutionary change in the system under which it is governed.
But as the PTI started gaining political ground, it grew increasingly vulnerable to the forces and factors that are quintessential in the growth of a political party. Resultantly today, the PTI, much against the wishes and plans of its founder, has acquired the character of a PARTY rather than a MOVEMENT.
It goes without saying that as a Political Party the PTI in order to achieve its inherent goal—acquisition of power— has to act within the framework of the system it has now become a part of.
That ironically is what Imran Khan had not envisioned. Deep in his mind burns a DESIRE for real change— change that would transform this country from a hunting ground for opportunists into a model Islamic Social Welfare State on the pattern of Madina of the seventh century.
What are IK’s options now? Should he allow himself to be drowned in the requisites of acquiring power in the current system? Or should he break away from this system— and declare a war on the forces that are its only beneficiaries?
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