Is Imran Khan Doing Harakiri to Himself?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
It’s almost a year and a half that the people of Pakistan have been constantly seeking signs of their leader Imran Khan’s much-hyped and promised ‘Naya Pakistan’ on the horizon.
But while they have found none to infuse any sense of confidence in them that the promise will be translated into reality any time soon, they can sense that their ‘messiah’ is sliding down a course that may lead him into the precipice of political oblivion.
From the moment IK had made his entry into Pakistan’s macabre political arena, a quarter century ago, his battle cry was that he would rid Pakistan of its endemic culture of corruption and administer punishment on its robber-barons they richly deserved.
However, his slide downward began, precisely, when he allowed a Supreme Court-disgraced and convicted robber-baron like Nawaz Sharif to go abroad, ostensibly for urgent medical treatment. It could only happen in IK’s ‘New Pakistan’ that a convict serving his sentence in jail was not only allowed to leave the dungeons, in pomp and glory, but on his (NS’) own terms. IK’s government had initially demanded of him to deposit a surety of several billion Rupees but NS flatly refused to oblige. He slipped out by merely submitting an undertaking from his brother Shahbaz Sharif, who has a dozen cases of corruption pending against him.
IK, as per his own public statement, showered his clemency on NS much against the overwhelming consensus of his cabinet ministers against letting the shark out of the slammer. He may have thought his magnanimity would garner him political dividends. But that was wishful thinking, as events lately happening have categorically established.
Pakistan is agog since that picture of NS lounging in a London café with his coterie of rogues and scoundrels has hit the Pakistani media—and more than that its vibrant social media—like an avalanche. One may have read in history books about the ‘Face that launched a thousand ships’ (the face of Helen of Troy) and wondered what was so extraordinary in it that triggered a war.
But here we have this photograph of one of Pakistan’s most notorious rogues thumbing his nose, in the company of his gang, at IK and his much-touted ‘crusade’ against corruption. Compared the hedonism of NS and his rogue cabal with the sorry faces of IK and his colleagues. They have no explanation for the people of Pakistan’s very genuine and legitimate question: why were these thieves allowed to flee the coop in the first place, and how will the government bring them back to face justice, if ever?
Nawaz had gone out, in pomp and glory, against a written undertaking to return as soon as his medical condition improved sufficiently. Well, he’d left for London in mid-November. It’s now mid-January. Nawaz has already gone beyond the limit of six weeks granted to him by an ever-obliging Lahore High Court. His London café picture shows a reasonably healthy man spending leisurely hours with his family and courtiers. Will Imran be able to bring back this nemesis of his back home to serve out his sentence and be tried for other offences? More important than that is the question, does IK have the will to turn the screws on NS and his gang or has he run out of steam to forge ahead in his crusade against corruption?
Within weeks of letting NS defy with impunity the scales of justice and accountability—IK’s pet themes for public consumption—the putative architect of a different kind of Pakistan, Imran ended up with a huge fiasco in Pakistan’s foreign relations.
He brought disgrace to Pakistan and a lot of egg on his face, too, when he walked out of his own scheme of assembling leaders of the Muslim world in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to draw up a bold new vision and blueprint for the Ummah to forge a new image of Muslims in the eyes of the world. It didn’t tease any brains to figure out why the intrepid kaptan had cold feet? He succumbed to crude Saudi pressure and buckled like a spring chicken.
Imran’s defenders and apologists tried to put up a bold face by arguing that he was moved by his concern for the unity of the Ummah. His was a move of real-politik, they argued. But the critics of this brazen behavior had it right: it was ‘Riyal politics’ that had swayed IK and exposed his soft underbelly.
But the latest episode of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani’s cold-blooded murder could well be the bottom line on IK’s debacle in his quest to become a leader of the Muslim world.
Iran is Pakistan’s next- door neighbor, with whom we share not only thousands of miles of land borders but, more valued than that, millennia of common cultural mores, faiths and much, much more. And yet IK’s ‘Naya Pakistan’ reacted to the grisly episode utterly timidly and meekly.
Not only Pakistan didn’t have the decency to offer its condolences over the demise of Soleimani but it had the temerity to advise Iran to show restraint in the face of calculated provocation—a weird and strange logic to put the aggressor and the aggrieved on the same pedestal.
Offering condolences on the demise of a fellow Muslim is a religious norm among Muslims of all persuasions and stripes. That the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan would shun this practice and be so tentative about it is beyond comprehension. The only explanation for this macabre behavior could be the IK regime’s abject surrender to the whims of their Saudi and US mentors to whom Soleimani was an arch ‘terrorist’ and the Iranian regime an exporter of terrorism in the region.
But it wasn’t the end of the episode as far as Imran’s Pakistan is concerned. Not content with its tail caught between its legs in the episode, IK’s government—IK himself, to be exact—saw in it an opportunity to prove its diplomatic dexterity and acumen.
On his boss’ command, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has set out on a journey of peace-making to Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US, the three principal parties to the conflict for hegemony in the Gulf. The voluble showman, Qureshi, has already covered the Tehran part of his safari and is in Riyadh, on the second leg, as these lines are being written. His next destination will be, of course, Washington.
Interestingly, Pakistan wasn’t asked by either party to the long-drawn out conflict, to be their peace-maker or arbiter. Pakistan has, obviously, taken it upon itself to try out its hand at defusing tension in the region. It’s a gratuitous mission of peace undertaken in the belief that Pakistan has access to all three parties and capitals and its mediation will be welcome.
However, Qureshi and his Foreign Office mandarins—if at all the professional Foreign Service officers have had anything to do with the exercise; I doubt if they have any role in it—don’t seem to realize that Pakistan doesn’t have the credentials of an ‘honest broker,’ a primordial requirement for any mediation.
Riyadh and Washington may condone a mediator’s role for Pakistan because Islamabad has given every proof, under IK, of being loyal to their whims and fancies and prone to be dictated by them. But Iran may have a different take on Pakistan. It doesn’t have to dig far or deep to come up with evidence of Pakistan being a loyal votary of both Riyadh and Washington. IK’s abject surrender to their diktat on the Kuala Lampur summit would suffice for Tehran to take Pakistan’s protestations and pretensions of an honest broker with a good pinch of salt. It has ample evidence available to cast a deep shadow on Pakistan being unshaded or unbiased between Iran, on the one hand, and the well-known Saudi-American alliance.
So, Qureshi’s safari doesn’t amount to anything more than a whimsical undertaking to satisfy IK’s bloated ego and serve his vision of grandeur and glory. The mission is doomed to be nothing more than a PR exercise on behalf of a beleaguered IK whose dismal track-record in economic (mis)management and overall governance.
This foreign policy adventure is more in the realm of escapism. It’s a quest for glory abroad to cover up snowballing and galling failures at home.
The recent gagging of NAB is as good as giving up the battle against corruption. More telling of IK’s loss of direction is the obscene haste with which the NA passed the bills to extend the tenure of Army Chief, Qamar Bajwa and other lords in uniform. It may well be the footnote to the sorry episode of IK abjectly surrendering all power and initiative to non-democratic forces lording over him.
Harakiri, in the Japanese culture, is honorable death by choice to defy shame and dishonor. In the Pakistani context, it means differently. It’s weakness of personality and utter helplessness to act according to one’s will. IK had mounted to the pinnacle of power with a loud bang. Millions of Pakistanis cheered him and saw in him the ascent of their own vision of a Pakistan finally taking to the course charted for it by its founding father, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Millions were prepared to proclaim IK as their messiah to shepherd them to Quaid’s Pakistan. Those millions, and many more, are at a loss to understand what went wrong with their shepherd so quickly and what has forced him back to tread on the beaten and dusty course of that ‘old Pakistan’ that they and their chosen shepherd loathed so much?
Pundits may equally be at a loss to come up with answers. It’s anybody’s guessing game all over.
K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a retired ambassador and career diplomat)
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