- Fawad Chaudhry seems to think so
That Federal Minister for Science and Technology, Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, has blamed the continuous and often public infighting within the PTI for its failure to deliver in key areas is quite a convenient and simplistic excuse for bad planning and execution. Chaudhry, in a frank, tell-all interview with an international news outlet, exposed how the rivalries among the top cadres of the party that includes Jehangir Tareen, Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Asad Umar, made it difficult for Prime Minister Imran Khan to execute his reforms agenda. He goes on to reveal how Tareen got Umar sacked first from the post of Finance Minister and once Umar reentered the federal cabinet some months later, he pushed Tareen out. While these events are fairly recent, the PTI has been dealing with such disputes for much longer, which is why it has also had problems in smoothly conducting intraparty elections. There is another dimension to these problems that the PTI perpetually faces, something that Fawad Chaudhry failed to pay any attention to; the PTI’s founder-chairman, Imran Khan’s virtual incapability to timely quell these internal quarrels that disrupt his supposed progress towards a ‘naya Pakistan’. Factionalism is not exclusive to the PTI; all political parties go through it. The PML(N) and PPP are much older parties than the PTI and have had their fair share of forward blocs and different factions cropping up through the years, but its leadership anticipated them and made necessary corrections so that things did not get too much out of hand. A collection and therefore clash of egos is also not PTI-specific, it is present in every mainstream political party, and has to be managed in a way that the momentum of governance is not broken.
According to Chaudhry, the vacuum created by Mr Khan’s core team’s untimely exit was filled by bureaucrats who are not aligned with the party’s mission. This implies that the PM is unable to or is disallowed from hiring the best people for the job on merit. These revelations come from a party insider, a sitting federal minister, not the opposition, and paint a worryingly disturbing picture of how the country is being run. If there was any doubt left, as to where the power to make decisions lies in this current regime and why his party’s performance has been so abysmal, Fawad Chaudhry has provided some much needed clarification, and for a change, it isn’t anyone else’s fault but the PTI’s.
