Non-violent resistance, civil disobedience, anarcho-pasificsm, embodied in examples of the Pashtun Khudai Khidmatgars, Gandhi’s Satyagrahas and King’s Civil Rights protesters were all about resistance and not about disobeying the law and getting away with it. Protesters were beaten, locked up, shot, without them violently resisting. These were philosophies that had faith in human pity, mercy, justice and compassion. These were people willing to die at the hands of their oppressors in the name of peaceful change. So, Imran needs to ask himself, what does he have in common with Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau and Abdul Gaffar (‘Bacha’) Khan? Neither does he have a great cause, like segregation, slavery, colonial rule or martial law. Nor does he have a disciplined consistent following that will languish in jail for the cause of Nawaz Sharif’s resignation. All he has is a bloated ego, no understanding of politics and protest, no philosophy or strategy guiding him, and a following that is officially disappointed in him. He demands mob rule, violence against a legal head of state and breaking the law until he’s PM; also called fascism.
Imran Khan is forgetting that politics is a game where losing is always on the cards. His cricket career should have taught him not to be a sore loser. His last speech made him transparent, showed him to be weak, incoherent and petty. How can the chairman of a mainstream political party advocate that people break the law and not pay taxes? When his own party sits in parliament as representatives? If he has so much support, such a great party and mandate, what is stopping him from sweeping the next elections?
There was a killing spree in Model Town, Dar might be cooking numbers, Rana Mashood keeps making threats, Nandipur was a fake power plant, election rigging most likely happened, and so many reasons to protest and ask for resignations from the PML-N. But there is no way an elected government and a full-fledged parliament can be dismissed by the force of a mob. Does Imran think he can strong arm himself into becoming Prime Minister because he has seen he does not have mass support, and will lose the next elections too? He has with great dexterity taken the attention off the panicking stumbling PML-N onto himself and his party’s intellectual weakness. If electoral reforms are not taken up seriously and urgently, perhaps the seeds of another crisis in the future will be inadvertently sowed by the PML-N. PTI could have very easily just asked for electoral reform, protested and called it a victory for themselves. This would have been enough of a feather in their cap but for Imran’s ego.