Things were pretty clear when Maulana Fazlur Rehman, president of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), announced the Azadi March towards Islamabad to oust the government led by Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). True to his word, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, together with his die-hard JUI supporters and a new crop of young madrassah students armed with lathi sticks, staged almost a two-week Dharna (sit-in) at the Peshawar Mor in the Capital. The Maulana said he had many a plan up his sleeve to exert pressure on the ‘selected’ government, which he was confident about immediately toppling. He thought Imran Khan’s prime ministership was constitutionally illegitimate and that he had come to power, thanks to an engineered electoral mandate gifted by the powers that be.

Throughout the Dharna, Fazlur Rehman issued time-bound warnings to the Prime Minister to quit and even made threatening speeches against the state and ‘institutions.’ who were alleged to have been at the back of Imran Khan from day one. Opportunism has always been the trademark of Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s distinctive political brand and the driving force behind his political career. The idiocy of his attention-grabbing plan was publicly exposed when the timing of his self-styled Azadi March coincided with Pakistan’s on-going campaign against India’s moves to usurp the State of Jammu & Kashmir. The Maulana himself served as Chairman of the Kashmir Committee of the National Assembly from September 2008 to May 2018. Though nothing significant happened for the Kashmir cause during his ten-year tenure, the Maulana should have been the first person to realize that Kashmir needed to be in the continued focus of international media more than ever. The Maulana needed to raise a strong voice in face of the Indian atrocities in the Valley, the non-stop curfew and the general lockdown. But he simply forgot about all that and was hell-bent on his ‘Azadi March’ against Imran Khan. He was not bothered about overshadowing the Kashmir cause. The result was that the national and international media focused more on the Dharna than highlighting Kashmir. India made good of the opportunity and drove the last nail in the coffin by formally absorbing Jammu and Kashmir into direct federal control and splitting the Indian-occupied valley into two union territories. This went unnoticed by the Maulana and he continued to pursue his vested interests.

From plan A to B and C, at the time of writing the Maulana was still out to fulfill his agenda. Ordering his stalwart supporters to block main arteries across the country to calling the opposition parties to build more pressure on the PTI government by fair means or foul, the sky seemed to be the limit for the Maulana’s pipe dream. The Government too seemed to be doing everything wrong. Its economic performance was dismal. It time and again displayed an inability to tackle governance matters with any judiciousness. Both the government and the Opposition seemed to be engaged in an effort to pull the rug from under each other’s feet. No one seemed to be really concerned about the everyday plight of the common man. The citizen is now fed up with the on-going political mud-slinging and power game and finds himself nowhere in the picture.

Bearing the brunt of a very low GDP growth rate, people have been trying to grapple with the after-effects of the consistent devaluation of the PKR, skyrocketing inflation and an alarming rate of unemployment. Then there is the government’s abject failure to control prices of essential food items and establish the writ of the state in general. It seems to be an open house for all. From the price of tomatoes to the missing dog-bite vaccine and the dengue epidemic, no one seems to be in charge whether at the federal or provincial level. Pakistan obviously does not need Dharna politics because this is not the route to stability and economic security. This is the time to build the country and to enforce strict measures to achieve goals in that direction. The system is almost on the verge of collapse and needs swift handling. Let the government rise to the occasion. The politicians on both sides of the aisle must choose a path that leads to economic development and social security. People like Maulana Fazlur Rehman must understand the gravity of the situation in the national context. For its part, the PTI, instead of grappling with the opposition’s vendetta-based politics, must take drastic measures to provide immediate relief to the people.