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Imran Stands Tall
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
The natural height of a person is God-given. However, stature is something that’s acquired through dint of one’s personal achievements in life. Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, draws out this distinction perfectly. Its expression for one’s natural height is qad; what one acquires through dint of labor is qamat, or stature.
Imran Khan, the political leader at the epicenter of Pakistan’s turbulent political landscape is tall, naturally, but the stature and political persona he has worked so hard to acquire puts him apart from the bunch of all the weird characters running the gamut in Pakistan.
Imran Khan’s (IK, to his doting aficionados) stature reminds one of the founder of Pakistan, M.A. Jinnah, or the Quaid-i-Azam, as he’s affectionately hailed and eulogized by his grateful nation. The Quaid stood head and shoulders above other luminaries that stalked the galaxy-laden political landscape of undivided India in the decades-long struggle for independence from the British Raj.
The Quaid’s towering personality has drawn many an accolade in history. However, the ultimate tribute to his stature was perhaps paid by Mr A.V. Alexander, Lord of Admiralty in Britain, who was one of the three members of the 1946 historic Cabinet Mission sent to India by the then British government.
A.V. Alexander said about the Quaid, ‘Mr Jinnah is so brave that none can intimidate him; he’s so honest that none can purchase him; and he’s so astute that none can mislead him.’
Since the early demise, in independent Pakistan, of the founding pioneers of the Pakistan Movement, there have been only two political personalities that could be said to have earned political heft and stature: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) and IK.
Both ZAB and IK have distinguished themselves by standing up to Pakistan’s military ‘Establishment’ which has become accustomed to lording over Pakistani politics for well over seven decades.
ZAB fell victim to a military-engineered judicial murder conspiracy carried to perfection. He remains the only Pakistani PM to have been hauled up the gallows.
If it had its way, the incumbent establishment would have meted out the same fate to IK, too. However, despite a myriad of its shenanigans, the degenerate junta hasn’t succeeded in putting teeth to its diabolical agenda against IK.
Not that the junta hasn’t tried to pave the way to the gallows to haul up IK on it as it had done to ZAB. It has, through its hand-maiden and pliable parliament packed with its favorite, bone-corrupt, political clowns, engineered changes in the Constitution suited to its nefarious plans. These so-called ‘amendments’ to the Constitution have snuffed every iota of independence from the judiciary, leaving it to the whims and diktats of political charlatans, in service to military barons of the junta.
Pakistan is, perhaps, the only so-called ‘democracy’ in the world where laws are architected to suit the personal convenience of political stalwarts and powerful barons, in uniform or mufti. The most popular leader of the people of Pakistan has been kept in a dark and dingy cell, in total isolation at Rawalpindi’s notorious Adiala Jail for well over 15 months. There has been no let-up in the brutal and inhumane repression of his followers and aficionados, who have been haunted and oppressed in ways that remind of the Russian Gulag.
IK continues to face more than 150 legal cases concocted against him on patently absurd and spurious grounds, with no end in sight to his legal woes, given the hen-pecked judiciary, whose wings have been blatantly clipped.
Yet, despite such naked repression and violations of his personal rights as a political icon to his faithful followers, IK has refused to give in to the junta’s diktats. Like the Great Quaid, there’s no way the junta could break his resolve, grit, and determination to weather all political storms and come out victorious and vindicated, in the end.
It’s not only IK’s indomitable will that has defied the diabolical plans of the junta. The presumed soft corner for IK in the team assembled by Donald Trump, the incoming US President, to run his administration, if not in his own heart, has exponentially added to the junta’s angst.
The junta’s early attempts to defame IK supporters, like Richard Grenel, for one, have turned flat. Grenel is DT’s nominee to become his personal envoy for special missions. As a former ambassador, Grenel is ideally suited for this position. A political clown, like Defense Minister Khwaja Asif, was commissioned to character assassinate Grenel. However, like a hot-air balloon, Khwaja Asif’s amateurish attempt to blackball Grenel as ‘gay’ was punctured before it could take off. Asif, the court jester, ended up with a lot of mud on his face.
Since then, the junta has tried other means to pre-empt DT’s presumed empathy for incarcerated IK.
So, what we witness on Pakistan’s macabre political stage is a spectacle rarely seen.
The oppressive junta is, literally, sweating with bated breath and with its eyes on January 20, the day DT will step into the Oval Office.
On the other hand, IK remains cool as a cucumber in his role as the defiant leader holding on to his principled resolve not to succumb to the junta’s blatant arm-twisting. He knows that time is on his side. Therefore, his agenda of demands is brimming with confidence. He isn’t prepared to swallow any bait extended from a beleaguered junta now beseeching him for a ‘deal.’ Why should he take the junta off the petard where it has painted itself because of its acts of commission and omission?
It’s time for justice to prevail in the court of the people of Pakistan. After all, the preamble of Pakistan’s Constitution dignifies its people as guardians of its sovereignty as vicegerents of Allah. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
