- Followers learn from leaders
The report in the Daily Mail, about PML-N President Mian Shehbaz Sharif, as Punjab Chief Minister, filching funds given by the UK’s Department For International Development (DFID), has been strongly denied by Mian Shehbaz’s son as well as the DFID. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the report, it should not be forgotten that it is at this stage merely a newspaper story, and there is still a long road to be travelled before it leads even to a court case, let alone to a conviction. However, what it has led to is a PTI barrage of criticism of the DFID. This is strange among representatives of a party that is desperate to get foreign investors to put their funds into the country.
The tendency has grown among ordinary PTI members because the party’s leader Imran Khan, though he has become Prime Minister, has been a one-issue politician. His constant hammering against corruption, preferably by a member of the Sharif family, has led to his first tweet on the controversy surrounding the video of the accountability judge who tried Mian Nawaz, in which he has castigated the Sharif family as a Sicilian mafia because it tried to bribe the judge. Did he realise that he had conceded something which has been a matter of debate: whether the video was genuine or not?
It seems that the myriad problems afflicting the country are subordinated to the hunger with the PTI, its leader at the front, for any evidence, no matter how thin, of corruption by a member of the Sharif family, and no matter how much harm is done to the country’s interests, as in the present case, it will plunge forward regardless. Mr Khan should set an example of more responsibility, in order to make his followers behave in ways which help rather than harm.
