The Mother of All Surrenders
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Imran’s media detractors and political rivals are gloating. His clipping of NAB’s wings and rendering it defanged—or neutered—is to them ‘the Mother of all NROs.’ They are entitled to feast themselves over Imran Khan’s fall from grace in whichever way pleasing to them. He Has handled them a stout club to beat him with.
However, to those of his fans and aficionados who saw him as a catalyst of change in Pakistan his recent moves are, to say the least, baffling and utterly frustrating. He’d been welcomed by them as a moral crusader, against those robber barons and corrupt politicians who had long held the nation hostage to their mind-boggling plundering of the national wealth.
The passage to the most important political office in Pakistan wasn’t easy for IK. He strived and unabatedly struggled for it for 22 long years. And all through those painstaking and often-heart-breaking years, his slogan of going after the corrupt and holding them accountable for their shenanigans never lost its pitch or ran out of steam.
His political opponents—most of them corrupt up to their bone-marrow—decried and ridiculed him for his full-throttled sloganeering to hold them accountable for their ‘crimes.’ They labelled him ‘Ehtesab (Accountability) Khan’ for his relentless pursuit of his ideal to clean up the act of corruption in Pakistan.
The younger generation of Pakistanis who flocked around him and literally worshipped him, was won over to his side because they believed in him and were ready to swear by him that his mission—once in office—will not go by default or wither on the vine.
But now, with his clumsy defanging of NAB he has done precisely what his followers had least expected of him. Like the proverbial revolution eating its children first, or the dragons devouring their own progeny, IK has sacrificed his raison d’etre in politics at the altar of expediency.
IK’s apologists are calling it an unavoidable and ineluctable adjustment to ground realities. The official defense of his weird move is that NAB was growing out of its boots and was poking its nose a little too much into the business community and making it nervous.
The argument being officially peddled is that restraining NAB or, in IK’s own words, ‘insulating’ the business community had become inevitable in order to assure the revival of business and industrial activity in the country. In other words, throwing NAB under the bus was deemed necessary in order to revive the businesses’ trust in government and blot out their ‘erroneous’ impression that the TIP government was business-unfriendly.
But this is an untenable defense. What the move is, in common parlance, an abject surrender to the arm-twisting by big business, many of whose stalwarts and luminaries can be found in IK’s ‘kitchen cabinet.’
It’s distressing to those who sincerely believed that IK had in him what it takes to turn Pakistan around from the reckless downward slop on which previous two regimes—of Nawaz and Zardari—had left it stranded. ‘Kaptan’s’ impressive track record in cricket was there to boost confidence in him. He brooked no interference, from any quarters, in his modus operandi as captain of the team, and would allow no nonsense to stand in his way.
Harking back to that illustrious record of his, it’s hard to reckon that in office of the highest responsibility of Pakistan, IK is proving to be just the opposite of it.
In the beginning one could laugh off his political opponents’ labelling of him as Mr U-Turn. He himself robustly defended his habit of changing his mind, all too frequently, by saying that a good captain—of a team or a ship—trimmed his sails according to the dictates of circumstances and developments. One saw no reason to fault him on that logic. It seems, however, that bowing to the winds, more often than necessary, can also wreck the ship. That’s precisely what has been happening to his crusade against corruption and his slogan to hammer out a ‘New Pakistan’ modelled on the ideal of the State of Medina, under the Holy Prophet (PBUH).
His U-Turns have been morphing, at an incredible pace, into abject surrenders.
He’d vowed to not allow mega-thieves, like Zardari and Nawaz, to see the light of the day or be accorded VIP handling in prisons. Yet, these nemeses of his proved him vacuous by living in five-star comfort in jails besides, ultimately, defying their confinement in them. Nawaz is away in UK, on effete medical grounds and Zardari has come out of prison, too.
It’s not only on the home front that he’s disappointing his fans with his dismal performance. In foreign relations, too, where he had hectored that he wouldn’t stoop down before anyone, his performance is equally below par. Earlier this month, his no-show at the KL Summit, under crude Saudi pressure—some said it was brazen blackmail—made a laughing stock of Pakistan in the international arena. Too add insult to injury, IK was one of the proponents of the idea to gather the best minds of the Muslim world in KL, with the idea of working out a template for the revival of the ‘Ummah.’
Given his past reputation of being a man of his word and too astute and forthright to be intimidated or coerced by anyone, it was unthinkable that just one audience with Saudi Arabia’s ambitious and ultra-adventurous heir apparent, MBS, IK would wilt like a summer rose exposed to toxic environments. But he did, abjectly, and hasn’t, to date, apologized to the nation for making it look like a giant with feet of clay.
How insidious of the leader of the largest military power in the Muslim world—and the only one with nuclear power—to give in meekly to the diktat of petty rulers whose only claim to fame is their bulging pockets of petro-dollars.
The official alibi—risible, no doubt— for turning his back on the KL Summit was that Pakistan didn’t wish to be party to any initiative to divide the Ummah. Apologists of IK, however, offered a more plausible excuse: KSA and other Gulf Sheikhdoms were home to millions of Pakistani workers, whose remittances made up a large chunk of our foreign exchange reserves. Besides, these oil-rich Sheikhdoms had bailed Pakistan out of those tight corners where erstwhile, corrupt and thieving, regimes had painted the country.
In a nutshell, what they were arguing said that national self-respect and pride could be bartered away in order to stay afloat, economy-wise.
The same argument, i.e. the long overdue revival of the moribund economy is now being floated with gusto to justify IK neutering NAB.
However, what no apologist or aficionado of IK would have the courage—or moral fiber—to say is that their ‘Kaptan’ is fast losing his grip over the reins of power. He has surrounded himself with cronies who are self-serving and happen to be past-masters of using their ‘leader’ to shelter their nests.
It’s not just the social media saying it out loud but there’s credible evidence that NAB’s anti-corruption drive was getting too close for comfort to the shelters of some mega-rich in IK’s close circle. NAB has been halted in its tracks lest it smoked out the thieves within PTI’s own ranks. It’s for the survival of the corrupt sheltering under the anti-corruption crusader’s wings that NAB has so unceremoniously been given a kick in its shins.
The bottom line is that the much-touted harbinger of change has turned out as much a denizen of the status quo as those he’d so vociferously ridiculed and lambasted, day -in and day-out.
There’s no joy, or comfort, in the heart of anyone who feels for Pakistan that its heralded messiah is no messiah. He’s as hopelessly betrothed to the country’s arcane ‘establishment’ as anyone else preceding him to the pinnacle of power. And any well-wisher or friends of IK should politely caution him not to raise the slogan of ‘New Pakistan’ ever again. There’s nothing different in his Pakistan than the one he’d inherited on the promise of changing it beyond recognition. Nothing has changed, and nothing will, under a steward given to abject surrender before the more powerful. There can’t be any defense of such an erratic and abrasive behavior. It’s clearly a case of flawed character and a weak personality.
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
