Though this bickering is going on in AP’s thread of 18 Oct. I want to know why PTIans are so perturbed? Don’t they have enough confidence in IK’s performance? Non other party used bad language against Bilawal and PPP, the PTIans contentiously using dirt language before and after the rally, posting demeaning photographs and Photoshopped pictures of rally to prove that few hundred attended the rally. Why?? If IK meant this is his tsunami or revolution, really Pakistan does not need such kind of cheap vulgarity. Keep this naya Pakistan, tsunami or revolution to your homes where it belong.
PPP public meeting in Karachi creates turmoil in PTI - thenews.com.pk
Tariq Butt
ISLAMABAD: The impact of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) public meeting in Karachi on politics apart, it instantly caused a considerable commotion in the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which gave the impression as if it was scared from it.
Some PTI leaders used their usual peculiar language against the PPP while referring to its public meeting. They believed that the Karachi rally was in response to the PTI’s scheduled meeting in Larkana on November 21.
However, the PTI is not the first non-PPP party that is holding a public meeting in Larkana, the hometown of Bhuttos. Nawaz Sharif had organized a number of such rallies there in the past.
The main contribution to the PTI show will be made by Mumtaz Bhutto, who has successively lost in all elections, and the spiritual followers of Vice Chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi, spread across interior Sindh. However, it will not be less than a miracle if they together will enable the PTI to win even a single seat from this area.
The anguish of PTI stalwarts and trolls was specifically noticeable on the social media. One leader wrote that the PPP rented people at Rs1000-Rs3000 each to fill the rally-cum-coronation and show of power and money made fun of poor people of Sindh.
There was also a barrage of attacks on the PPP for using official resources for the public rally. Misuse of government resources by any ruling political party for its activities is uncalled for and deserves condemnation, but this principle is required to be applied to every party in power. The PTI ignored the huge money spent on the official protocol that its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervaiz Khattak availed by constantly attending the sit-in in Islamabad. It is a huge joke.
Criticism was also showered on the PPP for jamming Karachi just for its public rally. It was wrong. However, considering the grave life threats to its patron-in-chief Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, extraordinary security measures were called for, but suspending routine activities in the Sindh metropolitan is unjustified.
While scoffing at this one-time situation caused by PPP in Karachi, the PTI did not spare a moment to think about making lives of Islamabad miserable for weeks. The PTI trolls blamed this condition on blocking of roads by the government by hundreds of containers. But they conveniently overlook the fact that these boxes were placed for the safety of people of the federal capital and to foil the conspiracy of storming the residential areas by the ‘revolutionaries’ to get dead bodies. The situation would have been created as per the plot, had the government not taken such steps.
The PTI’s consternation was incomprehensible if what Imran Khan says day in and day out that change is not coming but it has already come because of its protest starting on August 14 is to be believed. If it has actually solidly gained, its fear from only one PPP public meeting reflected its inherent concern that its ‘bubble’ of popularity, in the words of PPP chief Asif Zardari, may burst by a single event.
According to official account that the PTI did not deny, authorities deputed at least 2,700 police personnel for the protection of its recent public meeting in Multan. Besides, an unprecedented number of police and paramilitary forces were detailed in Islamabad during the sit-ins.
Harangue, blame-game and point scoring apart, what Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan and Bilawal are required to keep in mind is that their performance in their respective areas of governance will be at test in the next general elections.
Had the public rallies been a tangible barometer of popularity, the PTI-backed Malik Amir Dogar would have secured at least ninety percent of the polled votes in the Multan by-election and the security deposit of Javed Hashmi would have been confiscated. What happened did not show that Imran Khan’s change has come and the situation is somewhat similar to what it prevailed in May 2013 at the time of general elections. The electoral result belied the epic impression that the PTI has created at the public level, which is that it has flattened every political party specifically in Punjab and its gracing the victory stand in the next polls is now just a formality.
Public meetings are good for mobilization of political workers, but if this exercise goes unabated, fatigue and exhaustion plague them too much as has happened in the case of the two sit-ins in Islamabad, which have steadily experienced depletion of attendance.
In one sense, the concerns expressed by the PTI in its usual style were understandable. Since it damaged the PPP most in Punjab by taking away its majority votes in the 2013 polls, it is reacting to the PPP activity aggressively to retain its position. The main objective behind the PPP’s public meeting was to take back its lost slot across Pakistan and keep its hold on Sindh intact.
