... aka
Taliban Khan, who who convinced himself that playing cricket qualified him to lead a nuclear-armed nation with severe personality problems...
owes the country an answer to this simple question: what exactly was all that sound and fury last August all about? If the matter had been little more than angry speeches and walkouts from parliament we could have shrugged it off. If it was loud pressers and hostile talk show appearances, we could have accepted it.
Imran's got serious egg on his face, even in a country chock full of egg faces.
But no. In the name of their grievances, they laid siege to the capital city for months and caused a totally unnecessary delay in the visit by China's president, who wanted to announce $46bn worth of investment projects for the country.
They called for a tax revolt, arguing from their container-tops that there is no obligation to pay taxes to a government that the PTI has deemed illegitimate. They called on people to not pay their electricity bills, threatened to cut power supply from Tarbela dam (as if that was within their power to start off with), and urged resort to illegal hundi channels for all cross-border foreign exchange transactions, in order to squeeze the country's foreign exchange reserves and thereby push it towards default.
They briefly shut down the two largest cities in the country, Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
and Lahore, causing billions of rupees in loss to traders, and interrupting the movement of vital fuel supplies. Investment decisions were postponed, board meetings of important foreign investors were disrupted, and one CEO of a large multinational even took the highly unusual step of going public with his concerns (CEOs are usually a very cautious lot in terms of what they say in public).
Don't damage Pakistain's democracy story he warned, it's the best thing happening in the country currently. "Some of my Pak friends do not appreciate the enormity of this transition and what it means," he said, referring to the first historic democratic transfer of power in the country's history.
"[W]e need stability in the system, people to follow the rules laid down to obtain their demands, not a revolution or any other yearning for 'discipline' that comes from outside the system created by the Constitution.
"What I see happening in Pakistain today worries me because if people on the streets can start calling the shots, then it would negate the positive story of Pakistain to possible investors" from all around the world.
It's hard to underline how unusual it is for a CEO, particularly of a multinational company, to write words like this in a public forum, but that was the level of the anxiety that the dharnas created in the minds of investors.