Every new government is faced with the task of converting election promises into reality. The former mayor of New York Mario Cuomo phrased this predicament elegantly: ‘You campaign in poetry: you govern in prose.’ Prime Minister Imran Khan’s PTI government has the next five years to perfect its political syntax.

Although Imran Khan has, as he maintains, spent over twenty years agitating, demonstrating, electioneering, failing and then finally on 25 July succeeding to become prime minister, he comes to the post unprepared. He may know what he wants; he needs to master the complicated machinery of governance that will give him what he needs.  

His victory speech on 26 July, as Chairman PTI, was essentially a one-finger exercise, a simple tune played to appeal to the ears of an adoring domestic constituency and to foreign governments who sought reassurance that he knew how to hit the right notes. To their collective relief, he did.

His next speech on 19 August – his first address to the nation as prime minister – could not have been more formal in its purpose or more informal in its content. To an older generation of Pakistanis, inured to recycled platitudes, Imran Khan’s speech came as a refreshingly sincere, lateral view of their country. They were spoken to as deserving equals, not unworthy subordinates. To a younger generation – those who voted for him in 2018 – his open-hearted insight into his vision of the Pakistan they hope to live in will ensure that he retains their votes into 2023 and 2028, and who knows, perhaps even 2033. 

Many have forgotten that in the 1970s, nay-sayers dismissed the Pakistan Peoples Party as an ephemeral phenomenon. They contended that it would never survive beyond Mr Z. A. Bhutto. Yet it has – albeit truncated, emasculated, and subdivided, but still a Pavlovian electorate that responds to the Bhutto name.

By contrast, the PML-N has committed seppuku. Shahbaz Sharif, its nominal leader, allowed himself to be humiliated in the National Assembly contest for the prime minister-ship. The odds of him winning against Imran Khan were predictably weak. They were annihilated when Mr Zardari’s PPP-P withdrew its support, leaving him ‘naked unto his enemies’.

His son Humza made the same mistake and competed for the Punjab CM-ship against a PTI candidate who (regardless of his questionable candidacy) was guaranteed victory. Neither father nor son ever expected to spend the next five years (if not ten) fermenting in the opposition benches in Islamabad and Lahore.  All that remains now for the PML-N is the coup de grâce, seppuku’s final act - the merciful decapitation of the party’s head. 

The final contest for political supremacy between the PTI and its opponents is likely to be the nomination for the presidency of Pakistan. The election of the president is scheduled for 4 September. Again, the critical decision is in the hands of Mr Zardari, except in this case the victim will be his own candidate Mr Aitzaz Ahsan.

Admirers of Mr Aitzaz Ahsan regard him as pre-eminently qualified to represent our country as its apex. Mr Zardari however does not seem to share their enthusiasm. Mr Zardari knows that by not consulting his opposition partner PML-N in advance, he has torpedoed Mr Ahsan’s chances.

Each morning, the new government wakes up increasingly aware of the challenges it faces. If is wise, it will follow Euripides’ advice: ‘Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.’  Already, though, ministries are trying to buy time beyond the first magic-wand 100 days.

Today’s media (social and anti-social) spends its mornings discovering ways of reminding the new PTI government that the barbs its leaders had been hurling against its political opponents once shaped like arrows were in fact boomerangs.

Meanwhile, a few political pundits have begun to remark on the Saudi interest in the Pakistani general elections. They wonder whether the PTI’s reluctance to disclose the source of its foreign funding has anything to do with Saudi largesse. Could it be accidental that within the same twenty-four hours, the Saudis should announce a $4 billion loan from the Islamic Development Bank available to the new government, and that Pakistan should simultaneously support the Saudi’s angry stance against Canada?

Was it simply fortuitous that the Saudi ambassador Nawaf bin Said Al-Malki happened to be the first envoy to call on the new PM? Or that, when PM Imran Khan’s declared that he would not be travelling abroad for the next three months, the COAS General Qamar Bajwa (in Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj) should have been received in a one-to-one audience by Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman on 22 August?

Mr Imran Khan is gradually discovering that his country is akin to some huge VLCC oil tanker. Its future course can be changed only a degree at a time, otherwise the stresses on its hull would cause it to break up. He is also beginning to realise the actual power of his captaincy. He may have the steering wheel in his hands. He needs to know that the rudder does not have a mind of its own. Kaiser Wilhelm II realised that truth when it was too late. In exile in Holland after the First World War, he lamented: ‘The machine is running away with him [Hitler] as it ran away with me.’

[Unpublished. DAWN was closed on Thursday 23 August 2018 for Eid holidays.]