Dileep Kumar couldn’t. Get over it

Media Watch 

Fans of the PTI usually have an axe to grind with Nusrat Javeed, not Mushtaq Minshas. But Bolta Pakistan (12th May, Aaj TV) shook that arrangement up a bit. Minhas, a conservative pundit, is also generally conservative in his articulation, especially when compared to his firebrand co-host.

This programme wasn’t one of those. His grouse: the attitude of PTI voters after the elections. He said that only two parties had the right to complain in the elections: the ANP and the PPP. He was actually expecting them to, but they didn’t. It was a genuine plight that the ANP faced. Their rallies were bombed, so they resorted to corner meetings. Then, with the Yakka Toot blast of Peshawar, it was clear that even corner meetings were out of the question. They moved to door-to-door campaigning. Then, even those activists started being targeted. The PTI and the clerics, however, had the run of the place. They could have complained, Minhas says. But they didn’t.

Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, never the poster boy of a finishing school, conceded his defeat readily and openly.

But PTI fans are complaining for no big deal, Minhas thought. This much was a valid enough observation; moving on… NO. Minhas then decided to commit PTI blasphemy. He said PTI supporters took their cue from their immature leader, the one who “plays Dileep Kumar from a kheraati hospital… Paro, meri maan mar gaee. Yeh Dhaandli hui hay and all that.”

———————————–

Much is made of how the PTI has politicised a previously apathetic class. That isn’t true, actually. Apart from, perhaps in a bare basic semantic sense, the PTI followers, at least in the Punjab and Karachi, haven’t started viewing things in terms of Union Councils, Town Councils, MPAs and MNAs. They view things only in terms of Imran Khan. In the mind of PTI fans, “victory” is a scenario where Imran Khan calls the shots. Not a simple majority that needs no coalition partners but a constitution amending majority. No questions asked. No politics.

Anyone even slightly political would acknowledge that the PTI has had a fabulous election.

The Election Commission of Pakistan is a far from competent organisation. But like, say, the irrigation department or education. Its incompetence is undiscerning. Voters from the PML-N also suffer, as do those of the PPP. With so many PTI voters, young and old, saying they have voted for the first time, when they face a presiding officer not able to, say, find their block codes, they view it as rigging.

Matters are made worse by the media, which is what this piece is about. Results are given in a polling-station-to-polling-station basis. One polling station can give absolutely different results from even the next one. This is something that doesn’t need to be explained to rural voters, those currently being called jaahils by the party, but not those glued to their TV screens.

Polling counting is delayed and, whether the media should have been displaying results from 10% votes onwards is debatable. But even a marginal capacity for abstract thought can explain the “he was winning when I went to sleep and had lost when I woke up” mystery. One wonders whether the PTI polling agents were also asleep.

The MQM probably rigged NA-250. And through pre-poll rigging, it does not even need to do rigging (in the ballot box stuffing sense) in its heartland constituencies, where the other parties are effectively kept out by force. But NA-250 was probably won by the PPP’s Mirza Ikhtiar Beg in 2008 as well; back then, too, the MQM claimed the seat. It is only through the PTI’s efforts that a repeat of that has been made difficult and kudos to them.

In the Punjab, in Saad Rafiq’s seat, for instance, the PTI are being sore losers. Was I there? No. But because you, dear reader, were, doesn’t make you an authority on the subject. With over, half a million registered voters in NA constituencies, how can a particular set of voters, who count going to only one particular station as an achievement to be proud of, know what the situation elsewhere, especially in the villages of the constituency, was?

Post Script: The Lahore protests of the PTI were taking place outside the DHA outlets of Hotspot Ice-cream and OPTP, making the crowd look like a walking, talking cliché-ridden PTI stereotype. As if Azizi was describing them.

An equivalent would have been Nawaz Sharif eating Nihari before a meeting.

Or Altaf Hussain actually threatening to kill those who disagreed with… oh wait, that did happen.