You know things aren’t going well when a politician starts making impromptu pleas to celebrities to join his ‘movement’. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan had marched to Islamabad to extract Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s resignation. With no sign of success in sight, the PTI has instead decided to resign from provincial assemblies of Sindh and Punjab, and also from the National Assembly. As far as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is concerned – where the party is leading a coalition government – the PTI will decide only after “consulting with its coalition partners” in Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Awami Jamhoori Ittehad (AJI). JI Chief Siraj-ul-Haq and AJI Chief Shahram Tarakai, as well as certain members of PTI’s KPK chapter, are likely to oppose the dissolution of the provincial assembly. Not everyone shares Imran’s enthusiasm for undoing everything in agitation against the PML-N government. They see that the Azaadi March has fallen short of its promise, and that decisions taken in haste and desperation tend to do more harm than good.
First the march, then civil disobedience out of nowhere, announcement of resignations the next day, and now, Imran wants to take a stroll through the red zone with his many supporters. Clearly, Serena chowk just isn’t doing it for him. What is it exactly that he is trying to achieve here? Upon reaching a dead end, the sane thing to do is to turn around, and search for another way. It is insane to run into the wall hoping to bring it down. Chances are that at the end, the wall will still be standing unlike you. This doesn’t have to be PTI’s last stand. This doesn’t need to go on any longer. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his government should seriously consider helping out the PTI, no matter how outrageous it seems. Talk to him, give him something to show his supporters so he can call it a day.