AT PENPOINT
What exactly is one to make of the emergence of the Tareen group within the PTI? Matters have not gone to the extent of asking for separate seats in the National and Punjab Assemblies, but they had gone far enough for the Group to nominate parliamentary leaders. To that extent, it meant that the Group had established an identity of its own.
However, whether that identity is sufficient to approach the electorate is another matter. The Tareen Group may have some currency within the PTI, where Jahangir Tareen is a familiar senior figure, but where it is also clear that he is not exactly a vote-getter. That role is reserved for Imran Khan. This makes the Tareen Group a purely internal PTIÂ grouping, which is only relevant to national politics because the Tareen Group could bring down the PTI governments at the Centre and in Punjab.
It should be noted that the Tareen Group poses no threat in KP. That indicates the limit of its appeal, which is only limited to southern Punjab. That, coincidentally, is Mr Tareen’s adoptive area, from which he contested elections when was able to. Mr Tareen suffers from that disadvantage in leading a Group. Like Nawaz Sharif, he is judicially disqualified from ever holding public or party office.
The activity of the Tareen Group is being taken as an indicator that all is not well between Imran and the establishment, which is supposed to have carried out its most blatant intervention to bring him to office. However, he is thought to be guilty of the same sin as the previous flavours of the month, the PML(N) and the PPP, of assuming that he was something.
While it may be true that neither of these two could have first achieved power without establishment support (except the PPP in 1971), both have enough public support, enough coverage of the political spectrum, to remain political forces. Neither has so far been strong enough to oust the establishment from politics, and both seem more interested in getting the support necessary to come to power.
The Tareen Group seems a product of the fact that Jahangir Tareen has fallen out of favour with Imran Khan, and unlike almost the whole of the PTI, had developed links with the establishment before going into the PTI.
Imran has gone public on Tareen’s guilt, down to quantifying the loss he caused to the exchequer. That means he has convicted him in his mind, and is leaving the justice system to carry out the formalities. This is a contrast with other PTI stalwarts who had run-ins with the law, like Dr Babar Awan and Abdul Aleem Khan, who first resigned and were then reinstated after acquittal, but about whose guilt or innocence Imran never pronounced.
He was first a CM’s Adviser on Agriculture in Shehbaz Sharif’s first tenure as Punjab CM. He was Governor’s Adviser under the military government, and a minister in the Shaukat Aziz Cabinet. Shehbaz himself is counted as an establishment man, in the sense that he wants to work with the establishment, not take it on, as Mian Nawaz Sharif did during the recent Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM).
It is almost as if Tareen is supposed to play in the PTI the role Shehbaz does in the PML(N), that of keeping the leader honest, on the side of the angels. The formation of the Tareen Group has its main purpose that of ensuring that Jahangir Tareen gets a fair shake from the authorities. On the other hand, Imran believes Tareen’s involvement in the sugar crisis has harmed him. Whether Tareen is responsible for the crisis or not is irrelevant, it is the perception that matters.
Imran has gone public on Tareen’s guilt, down to quantifying the loss he caused to the exchequer. That means he has convicted him in his mind, and is leaving the justice system to carry out the formalities. This is a contrast with other PTI stalwarts who had run-ins with the law, like Dr Babar Awan and Abdul Aleem Khan, who first resigned and were then reinstated after acquittal, but about whose guilt or innocence Imran never pronounced. Another example, more recent, is of Zulfi Bukhari, who has resigned after being implicated in the Rawalpindi Ring Road scam, but about whom Imran has been quiet. Only in Tareen’s case was he not willing to leave the matter to the justice system.
The real problem seems to be that the establishment needs politicians to garner votes in the constitutional set-up that prevails. The direct rule by Ayub Khan did not really work, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto abandoning him to form his own party. He was left to pick up the pieces of a broken Pakistan in 1971, and was in turn replaced by Zia.
However, Zia knew that he could not hold on forever. He promised elections, but held them off until February 1985. The result included Nawaz as Punjab CM, but this could not last forever, and Zia became the first President to dissolve the National Assembly. As long as the President could, every Assembly was thus dissolved, and that too by two other Presidents.
The dissolution power no longer vests in the President, but that has not meant the end of interference. The problem is that the lid cannot be put on interference the more it happens. There is an odd dynamic at work. Those who yield ground are incapable of handling matters, while those who can handle matters are not amenable to guidance. Those who think they know best are thus left to use whatever methods of control they find possible.
The Tareen Group may have managed to demonstrate that the PTI government cannot survive without it, but that means that it will be obliged to do something Imran will find costly indeed: let Tareen get away with it. In other words, get an NRO. That is what he has sworn to deny the PML(N) and the PPP.
If Tareen manages to get away, that may do Imran irreparable damage among his base, which will have to choose between its reverence of Imran as leader, its desire for an accountability of Mian Nawaz Sharif and his relatives which punishes him irrespective of proof of guilt, and a wish to see PTI people protected.
While this moral corruption might seem bad enough, the alternative, that of the PTI consuming its own in the time-honoured tradition of dictatorships and one-party states, seems worse. The problem that seems to have arisen is that Tareen is not facing court cases because of any suspicion of wrongdoing, but because he was clashing with other powerful figures around Imran.
There is every sign that a court has arisen around Imran. That is perhaps inevitable around every party leader, but it is up to that leader to keep this tendency in check, and to keep his feet on the ground. One of the adverse consequences is the jockeying for position among the courtiers. Tareen seems to have been the victim of a cabal of enemies, but that was one of the inherent risks of having been one of the courtiers in the first place.
