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Don’t tell the PM that. He is talking the big talk — Kashmir, India, America, Afghanistan, — and swinging his rhetorical hammer like the mighty Thor. Hear his speeches, listen to his words, feel his tone, sense his oratorical swagger and you can tell the man has a grand scheme at hand. Standing atop the debris of broken promises and defective governance, he is envisioning a leap over and above this heap into the next level of political contestation where he towers over his opponents. He sees himself in the big league tackling bigger issues across an even bigger table. The idea of justice — Tehreek-i-Insaaf — brought him till here; now he is ready to spring forth from this platform on to a canvas that is much larger and more strategic. He exudes the confidence of a man who knows he is outgrowing this arena and is powered up for the more expansive one.
And that’s when the swagger can give one a misplaced sense of security. The littleness of little things may be showering down on the Red Zone like confetti, but underneath this hoopla of PTI’s hubris, PML-N leaders continue to walk free from NAB’s custody and into the sunlight of political vindication. Shehbaz Sharif, Rana Sanaullah, Saad Rafiq, Ahsan Iqbal, Shahid Abbasi, Miftah Ismail, Khawaja Asif and many others have successfully obtained bails and in the process torn holes in the accountability narrative so carefully nurtured by the PM. The courts in almost all cases have said the NAB had no solid evidence to back up its allegations against these politicians.
There is little littleness in the vindication of the PM’s biggest rivals at a time when optics will slowly start to give way to the harsh realities of constituency politics in the Punjab. There is a world out there, far away from hyperactive battlefields of twitter hashtags, Instagram memes and Facebook posts, which is thumping to the beat of conventional thana-katchery politics. The local bodies are groaning back to life after Supreme Court’s detailed judgement, and in the Punjab these bodies are dominated by the PML-N. Something is cooking below the radar level.
These little big things have a nasty habit of puncturing the hubris of power.