If there is one rule of political punditry that extends across all the nations, it is this: if you bite the bullet, do away with inhibitions and be loud and obnoxious, you will never, ever be short of fans.
More reasonable quarters in the US used to be amazed by the popularity of Bill ‘O Reilly of Fox News. Well, he was surpassed in popularity by one Glen Beck on the same channel. Beck’s intellectual stature made ‘O Riley seem like Robert Fisk in comparison.
In matters boorish, our leading light is one Mubasher Lucman. Now, being obnoxious does get one a lot of popularity, but also a bit of a negative vibe. Lucman wasn’t doing all too well, which was compounded by the famous leaked footage of his (and Meher Bukhari’s) soft interview with Malik Riaz.
It was after this point that Lucman decided to latch on to the rising wave. His programs during the PAT/PTI’s dharna started to do away with even the semblance of neutrality. He actually conducted one of his political talk shows on top of the famous container.
It did get the desired effect. The PTI army started worshipping him. Pictures started going viral online of the more devoted of his fans kissing TV sets on which his program was being shown.
To take a leaf out of Tipu Sultan’s book, public statements were being made to the effect that one program of Lucman’s was better a thousand programs of the likes of Saleem Safi and Talat Hussein.
Say what you will about the man, but in the aftermath of Geo’s showdown with the ISI, Lucman single-handedly brought ARY to the topslot, something which it probably hadn’t ever really seen.
Now, it seems he has flipped his position on the PTI. The followers of the party, predictably, have flipped their position on him. He has gone back to being the epitome of “lifafa” journalists that the PTI is always decrying.
On the series of programs that are criticising the PTI-led government in KP: the reader should know that Pakistan is a difficult country to govern. As is the war-hit province of KP. We can’t expect first world standards there. If you have a camera and a mic, you can go to any hospital, under any government, and chances are that the man-on-the-street sound-bites are going to be critical of the government. People are over-sensitive in hospitals; go to an NHS hospital in the UK and you will find people complaining about government apathy.
But, if that is the case, the PTI’s sympathisers should be cutting, say, the PML(N) the same slack. Or, in the case of the very same Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, the previous ANP government. The “educated” PTI supporters seem to have different standards.
Forget that and let us move to the issue itself. The indictment of the PTI isn’t the fact that people are seen by the camera to be unhappy with the state of affairs at hospitals. It is facts and statistics. The PTI’s government has consistently been letting the bulk of its development budget lapse. And this is by its own admission, so you can’t really accuse whoever is doing the reporting of being a paid agent. For those readers who are not well-versed with public policy: the amount of development budget utilised is a somewhat flawed metric of a government’s competence, but the amount of a government’s development budget lapsed is a fairly good estimate of a government’s incompetence.
Secondly, Lucman also uncovered, in recent programs, that the provincial government has also been making fake claims regarding the provision of free medicines.
If one were to look at the education sector, which Lucman has in this series, the situation is somewhat similar.
Imran Khan has a bit of a teflon coating when it comes to negative publicity. Nothing sticks to him. No one will remember this by the time of the next elections. The ANP, which had literally doubled the number of degree colleges (and more than doubled the number of public universities) that the province had before they came into power, doesn’t have the same luck.
It’ll take more than just Mubasher Lucman to scrape off the teflon from either Imran Khan or the PTI.