With general election in sight the political parties tend to modify their positions on various national issues on a day-to-day basis. They appear to be oblivious of the risk their sudden moves can cause to their public image. What a party would have upheld and propounded to be its principled position yesterday may well be discarded and thrown out of the window today as outmoded and outdated. The party leadership is, therefore, required to mark out its new position - which in actuality may be a 180-degree reversal of the original. There is no shame over this about-turn; after it's for this they say politics is game of the possible.
Accepted, it is not a new phenomenon; in the past too such 'adjustments' were in vogue, but the degree and speed it has now acquired it's simply mind-boggling. Consider, just what happened last Tuesday. Leaders of the MQM met their PML (N) counterparts and decided to 'carry forward the dialogue', ANP joined PML (N) to attack the government in the Senate during a debate over gas and oil price hikes; PPP appears ready to jettison ANP as a chasm in the Sindh coalition widens over PPP-MQM deal in relation to promulgation of LG Ordinance. Moreover, rumours of some kind of covert understanding between the PPP and PML (N) kept swirling about the Capital irrespective of Chaudhry Nisar's overt anti-PPP hard-line which is said to be an increasingly lonely voice. Why this entire stampede; the only answer that instantly comes to mind is that all of it is for political gains and that game did accrue in the shape of an agreement between PPP and the MQM on the Local Bodies' law in Sindh province. In Pakistan it is an integral part of the game called national politics. But people's memory is not that short the politicians would like us to believe.
All this rush for political gains when juxtaposed against apocalyptic proportions of public misery and people's lingering disappointment over the performance of their elected representatives an impression emerges as if democracy in its present form in Pakistan is antithetical to its pristine objectives. Not that democracy has failed, it is the failure of our political leaders and their parties whose self-serving 'causes' and quickly changing positions that have landed the country in such a state of hopelessness and helplessness.
For example, take the case of PML (N). It was thrown out of power by a military dictator and it sought refuge abroad - as is the common practice with most of the Third World countries. But it was the same dictator who was instrumental in paving the way for their return. For the first two years the leadership of both PPP and PML-N went along holding hands, making joint pledges and forgiving each other's past sins. But then their perceptional mismatch over their future political prospects injected heavy doses of mistrust in their honeymooned relationship and parted company, a rift that accentuated over time with hard-liners in driving seats on both sides. If today they are trying to rekindle their old love, one would not be greatly surprised. After all politics is an art of the possible, and in their case the possibility of surviving threat of getting deluged by Imran Khan's proclaimed tsunami lies in getting together again.