Imran Khan has made an eminently bold and astounding move on the chessboard of Pakistan’s arcane politics - Business Recorder

 

A Gamble or Gambit? Imran’s Choice of a Caretaker Successor!
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

Imran Khan’s choice—while hibernating behind bars because that’s how his power-besotted tormentors would like to incapacitate and hemorrhage his obvious grip on Pakistani politics as its stellar player—of a little-known stop-gap successor to keep the seat warm for him has stirred a hornet’s nest of speculation in its trail.

The young Gohar Khan, a barrister of law, who has been representing Imran Khan (IK) in many of the nearly two hundred cases spuriously concocted against his celebrity-client, has no political pedigree to boot. That—the absence of a political lineage or pedigree—is the mother of controversy surrounding his nomination as the interim or caretaker Chairman of IK’s Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI).

Pakistani politics is addicted to dynastic succession. The rule has been followed in the Islamic Republic with religious zeal and sanctity. It’s a given thing in the country’s arcane political culture that a political luminary should be succeeded by a brother, or son or daughter. The Bhuttos, The Zardaris, The Sharifs et al. have followed this norm unabashedly with religious fervor. No eyebrows were raised in any succession among these ‘dynasties’ of Pakistan.

So, IK, in a sense, has done something akin to sacrilege by not promoting a family scion to take his place. He has sons, alright. But he hasn’t inducted them into politics. He has well-educated sisters—who, incidentally, have been actively canvassing against his forced incarceration and persecution at the hands of Pakistan’s power-addicted ‘Establishment.’ But IK’s sisters haven’t given the slightest hint of picking up the mantle of their hounded brother; nor has he ever encouraged them to.

IK is being an iconoclast in breaking away from the norm and, in fact, breaking the mold of dynastic succession by naming a non-political entity to head his beleaguered party while he’s made, under duress, to cool his heels.

It brings back a flood of memories to me, from my experience as Ambassador of Pakistan in Turkey, at the turn of the century.

Tayyeb Recep Erdogan—who has dominated Turkish and global politics as an iconoclast in the mold of IK—was then in prison and political wilderness because of the ire of Turkey’s dominant and arrogant military establishment. Erdogan had rubbed the haughty Turkish generals on the wrong side as the popular mayor of Istanbul—the heart of Turkey—in the late 1990s.

Like the bogus Cypher case in which IK has been implicated, Erdogan was accused of injecting ‘religious element’ into politics because of a speech he’d delivered as mayor. The self-styled guardians of Turkey’s Kemalism—a euphemism coined by power-hungry generals for the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—found fault with Erdogan for using a poem of Nazim Hikmet in his public speech. Nazim Hikmet was a favorite with Ataturk, but the self-anointed guardians of his legacy disdained Hikmet and banished him to Moscow where he died in 1963.

Erdogan was referred to Turkey’s Constitutional Court for violating the Kemalist Code of political secularism because he’d alluded to Hikmet’s poetry saying the minaret of the mosque was his lance, with which he would fight with his enemy and the mosque’s dome was his shield to defend against the enemy’s thrust.

It wasn’t a surprise to those who knew the generals’ hold over Turkey’s justice system that Erdogan was punished by the Constitutional Court and banished from politics for six years, in 1997.

While Erdogan was in forced hibernation, his Development and Justice (AK) Party was gaining popular support, just like IK’s PTI in Pakistan despite the strongarming of political process by the power-inebriated Establishment.

The 2001 general elections in Turkey resulted in Erdogan’s AK Party sweeping the polls and gaining power. In his absence from active politics, Erdogan promoted his affable and loyal colleague, Abdullah Gul, to hold the levers of power as PM.

Abdullah Gul was a thorough gentleman. A man of effusive charms, he had been friends with me while making himself known among the diplomats in Ankara. Gul proved his credentials as a loyal factotum. He handed over the reins of power to Erdogan when the latter was rehabilitated after his forced exile from politics, in 2003. Gul faded into the shadows with exquisite decency.

That IK may have, even unwittingly, borrowed a leaf from Erdogan’s book is not surprising. Both are not only fiercely unconventional in their political moorings but also anti-establishment. Erdogan has eminently insulated Turkish politics from the nauseating interference from the once-overly-powerful military establishment. IK is still far from that success.

IK has another handicap that didn’t pose an impediment to Erdogan. There’s no political dynasty to contend with in Turkey. IK’s added headache is to parry several political dynasties who, to his regret, and that of most independent commentators of Pakistani politics, are not only opposed to him for his iconoclastic politics but enjoy patronage of the nagging Establishment. The fanfare surrounding the return of a fugitive Nawaz Sharif and his rehabilitation in active politics despite the ban imposed on it by the apex court of Pakistan is proof of it. He’s being relaunched by the same Establishment that once had hounded him out of power.

Seen in this perspective, IK’s choice of a non-political figure to carry the burden of leading his party, while he himself remains out in the cold, makes eminent sense.

Political pundits weaned on the model of Pakistan’s traditional and dynasty-bound politics, may come up with stereotype arguments that IK, in choosing a non-political entity to keep his seat warm in his absence, has pronounced a vote of no-confidence against the stalwarts of his party.

Yes, they may have a point in saying IK has shunned well-known figures—like Chaudhry Pervez Elahi and Shah Mehmood Qureshi who were expected, by most pundits to inherit his mantle—and gone over their heads to pick up a figure of obscurity to carry his banner. But, seen from IK’s niche, the choice makes all the sense.

With no base of his own, Barrister Gohar Khan will have little or no temptation to seek political camaraderie from any segment of PTI or cut any kind of deal—while leading the party—with any ‘powerful quarters’, aka Pakistani Establishment. Such a guarantee couldn’t be flaunted in the case of an old guard of the party.

IK’s hand to pick a successor, or interim successor, at the helm of the party has been forced by the recent decision of the apparently-compromised and biased Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) threatening the party with dire consequences if intra-party elections weren’t held within three weeks. ECP is un-abashedly anti-IK and anti-PTI. Its Chief has been acting like a rubber-stamp of the Establishment and whichever party has the generals’ blessings.

On top of it, all efforts of the Establishment—with a helping hand from the country’s perennially shaded judiciary at its beck and command—seem persistently focused on keeping IK behind bars—and thus unable to lead the party at the hustings of the impending general elections, announced for February 8. In such a hostile ambience—and with an uneven playing field—IK's path is strewn with all kinds of obstacles.

Settling for a non-political barrister to temporarily lead the party may well prove its logic in the upcoming election campaign. Barrister Gohar Khan may turn the tables on the besotted Establishment with the active help of his lawyers’ fraternity. Lawyers dictating their terms at the polls isn’t a novelty in Pakistan. Quite to the contrary, there’s a history of lawyers leaving an indelible imprint of their influence over the course of politics and governance in the country. The 2007 movement against General Musharraf’s vendetta against the then Chief Justice of Pakistan is a case in point.

In that respect, IK’s chosen successor has sterling credentials. He’s the head of eminent lawyer, Aitezaz Ahsan’s legal team in Islamabad and will, no doubt, be getting sound guidelines in his new job from a seasoned lawyer-politician like Aitezaz Ahsan.

So, much as many a jaded pundit may reason that IK has erred in passing the buck to a novice—and his gamble may not pay off—they may be too quick in their judgment. IK, in my sense, has made an eminently bold and astounding move on the chessboard of Pakistan’s arcane politics. He may have taken his nemeses in the Establishment by complete surprise. Let’s see how they tackle his gambit. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and a career diplomat)