- The rank-and-file must learn tolerance
The PTI is in danger of becoming a violent party. First PTI leader Masroor Ali Sial attacked and beat up Karachi Press Club President Imtiaz Khan Faran while they were appearing on a TV talkshow, then Water Resources Minister Faisal Vawda said in the National Assembly that corrupt and money-launderers should be tied and dragged behind a vehicle before being hanged. Earlier Mr Vawda had said on a TV talkshow that 5000 people needed to be hanged to transform the country. Vawda’s latest statement came out after Mr Sial had been rapped across the knuckles by PM’s Special Assistant for Political Affairs, Naeemul Haque, who condemned the incident in a tweet, and promised disciplinary action. Mr Vawda is obviously more inclined to direct action. He was the minister who turned up at the Chinese consulate in Karachi when it was attacked, on a Harley Davidson bike, armed with a pistol and clad in a bulletproof vest.
He could have been dismissed as a single maladjusted individual, had Mr Sial not done what he did. Is this a Karachi thing? The PTI’s predecessor as the dominant party in Karachi, the MQM, always had a miasma of violence surrounding it. The PTI itself has not succeeded just in Karachi, but all over the country, and the language used by its leaders has been violent since its inception. This self-righteousness has led to the PTI not only looking at opposing leaders as corrupt, but also dealing with their supporters as also corrupt. The PTI has already paid a price for refusing to see shades of grey: it has so far failed to pass any legislation, because it lacks a majority in the Senate, which should have meant engaging the oppositions constructively, with reasoned words rather than slogans and blows.
It remains to be seen what disciplinary action against Mr Sial is taken. Ideally, it should such as well help inculcate the danger of intolerance, in the sense of the readiness to eschew violence as a means of resolving differences. The PTI must also find a means of inculcating in its followers the virtue of leaving differences with others unresolved but respected. The PTI, leaders and cadres alike, should keep in mind that such intolerance, combined with reliance on achieving power by electoral means, degenerates first into fascism, and then into plain and unvarnished criminality. And not the white-collar variety the PTI decries so much, but such crimes as murder and extortion.
