My belief in the term is solidifying with every passing day. To understand the context, we must place Pakistan politics under the magnifying glass.
The talk of the town these days is the vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Imran Khan. The PM and eventually his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), will be ousted if the opposition manages to reach the magic number of 172 votes in the parliament. The opposition will then have the options to go for the national or interim or consensus government.
It would be worth pondering on the need for such political re-engineering. The reason is that Imran Khan and his PTI lack the ability to tackle crises that have piled up on Pakistan since he assumed office. Khan was warmly welcomed by the masses that wanted to see change from dynastic politics, and he seemed to be their only hope.
His failure to deliver is ascribed to several concurrent factors. Firstly, Imran Khan’s obsession with hunting down the two mainstream opposition parties. It felt like seeing pacers trying to bowl bouncers on the dead pitch of the Rawalpindi cricket stadium. The crowd got utterly bored.
Secondly, Khan’s inability to put together a professional team to address core areas of concerns, such as rule of law, economy, administration and bad governance. It was a continuous exhibition of musical chair with two major problems; participants were grown-ups with not so happy faces and the music was absurd.
Imran Khan is squandering two decades of political stature he built with perseverance and set of rules. He is losing the shine that bewitched his supporters. More critically, he is losing the selectors who are increasingly uncomfortable with sharing the same page with him.
Thirdly, Khan’s inability to lead the parliament from the front to resolve the country’s old issues. Instead, he tried to form a fascist regime -- because the opposition is so crooked that it deserves to be thrashed out of Pakistan politics. This created a division not only in the parliament but also across the country, as the opposition parties command twice the voter support that the PTI managed in the last elections.
Fourth, strings binding the skipper and the selectors frayed rapidly. The realization that the selectors are being blamed to bring the country to its worse shape in decades compelled them keep a distance from the PTI government.
Regardless of all these setbacks and failures, Imran Khan is pretty certain that the opposition cannot harm his government. Day by day pressure is mounting on the PTI government from far and wide. Imran Khan is famous for performing well under pressure from his cricketing days. He has realized that the battle against time has begun. They must perform miracles now. They must ease the intra-party disputes to act as one unit. It is time for this government to rise and show their real potential to address inflation, bad governance, non-serious attitude of the cabinet ministers and lawlessness that is making people uneasy.
Imran Khan is squandering two decades of political stature he built with perseverance and set of rules. He is losing the shine that bewitched his supporters. More critically, he is losing the selectors who are increasingly uncomfortable with sharing the same page with him.
No one knows the fate of this government, but certainly this is a game of Hunt or Be Hunted.