Asif Mahmood
The Peshawar rally of the PTI will be remembered for two uncomfortable truths. First, a thin turnout despite the party’s continued claim to public mandate. Second, the same inflammatory and hateful rhetoric that has defined its public persona for years. If anyone had hoped that accession to power or a period of reflection would produce sobriety and institutional respect, that hope was disappointed.
This is not merely a matter of rude speech. For a long time the party has institutionalized agitation as a political method. That is not politics, it is a destructive habit that points toward a far more dangerous disposition. When insults are elevated to policy and fury to strategy, the result is not debate, it is social corrosion
Senior party figures now complain that certain words should not have been used about their leader. Yet they remain silent on whether their leader should have used denigrating language about the Field Marshal. One cannot claim moral high ground by objecting to the consequences of a style one has cultivated for years. If there is a limit to acceptable speech for others, the same limit should apply to one’s own camp.
Hypocrisy is the recurring motif. When party supporters vilified political opponents in ways that crossed every line of decency, there was rarely a public rebuke from within. When the heat of retaliation reached their own precincts, sudden sermons on ethics appeared from those who had remained indifferent before. Selective outrage is not ethics. It is convenience.
Our history places a burden on institutions. That is a matter of record and a matter of public debate. But the question cut through the rhetoric is simple. Which of the party’s leaders has a spotless past that justifies perpetual sanctimony? If a leader is to be shielded from criticism because of past grievances, then we must apply the same standard to every public figure. Otherwise we have entered the realm of partisanship without principle.
This movement’s intolerance of dissent is instructive. Any dissenting voice within the party’s orbit was met with a barrage of slander and personal attack. The logic was simple, and corrosive. Only adherence and adulation were tolerated. Any departure from absolute loyalty was treated as betrayal deserving of public shaming. That pattern is incompatible with pluralistic politics and incompatible with democratic practice.
The party presents itself as the only true bearer of national interest while demanding a monopoly over public discourse. It insists that only its supporters may speak and even abuse and that others must listen in silence. When someone answers back, ethics are invoked as if ethics were a tool rather than a principle. This is not political consciousness. This is a cult of personality masquerading as reform.
Its temperament is destructive. Its declared priority is not construction but chaos. Its energy is not for policy making but for provocation. It refuses sustained engagement with democratic institutions. It prefers confrontation to compromise.
The party must ask whether its tactics have served the nation or its own ambitions.
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