Dwarika Prasad Sharma
Over the 22 years since he created the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party and entered politics, Imran Khan, who is now a smidgen away from being formally installed as prime minister, has changed several colours.
The Oxford-educated former cricket captain of his country had a liberal outlook at the outset, but the ordinary showing of his party in the 2013 general election forced him to change his stripes. He realised that the military, mullahs and jehadis play a potent role in his country for fulfilling one’s political ambitions.
When, in 2011, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who often spoke against the country’s blasphemy law, was assassinated by Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, his young bodyguard, Imran condemned the assassin when many in the country were lionising him. He at the time was also urging the Government to act against the mullahs. That was then.
After 2013, he soon earned the nickname Taliban Imran. His party’s Government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gave a $ 3 million grant to the Haqqania Madrassa, a breeding ground for the Haqqani network, which is also called “the University of Jehad”. Afghanistan has been blaming the Haqqani network for several deadly attacks in the country and ruing the fact that they hit and sneak back to their Pakistani sanctuaries. The PTI also wants Taliban offices to be allowed to be opened in major towns in Pakistan.
During the 2018 election campaign, the party projected an approving picture of fanatics like Qadri, when his figure was displayed on its banners, and the voters were asked if they would rather vote for protecting the country’s Islamic laws like the one on blasphemy, or vote for the PML-N, the PM of which party had hanged Qadri in 2016.
If politics is the art of the possible, it is also the art of turning coat, artfully or crudely.
It is generally said and believed that Imran has no administrative experience, and hardly anyone would question that observation. This is something that his own party colleagues, like Asad Umar, acknowledge. He betrayed himself during his virtual “address to the nation” as an almost-there prime minister. His fumbling not only gave him away as a poor speaker, but also one who is pathetically tentative on policy enunciations. (Our Umar Abdullah wants that he be allowed some time.)
Our own Pappu is a better speaker when speed of delivery is concerned, though he is faux-prone. His no-confidence speech in the Lok Sabha was a well-memorised script (penned by Jairam Ramesh?), but Imran’s address was rather poorly memorised (from script penned by Asad Umar?). Our chhappan chhuri (56 daggers) Pappu has a way with rapid-firing at the 56-inch-chhaati (chest), though the aim may go wildly haywire.
On relations with India, which is his country’s self-imposed head and heart ache, he was formulaic and expectedly far from innovative. To the subject he came way down in his speech, after meandering through other issues which he considered to be his country’s major concerns. Here his choice of words was a tad odd. He said that “Pakistan was ready to improve its ties with India, and his Government would like the leaders of the two countries to resolve all disputes, including the core issue of Kashmir, through talks”. Was “ready to” is rather undiplomatic as it connotes a condescending outlook and an assumption that India is cold to the process. India has consistently taken the stand that Kashmir can be one of the issues in a “composite” or “comprehensive” dialogue, and that is how talks were proceeding in the recent past.
Among other things, Imran said that more trade exchanges between the two would be mutually beneficial, and that India had a large market to offer. It could also be of help in alleviating the poverty in the two countries, he added. This marked a shift from his taunt against the “beopary” (trader) Nawaz Sharief, “friend of Narendra Modi”, for wanting to expand trade ties with India and not focusing enough on the “core issue” of Kashmir.
Imran wanted peace to be established in Afghanistan, for wider peace in the subcontinent, but can that be done by aiding and abetting the Haqqanis and the Taliban?
He had a new-found positive take on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, on which he had earlier expressed serious misgivings for the lack of transparency in its projects, which, he had said, could be a source of deep corruption. Chinese media have been cautioning him not to fall to Western “propaganda” against the project.
The ace cricketer has been quite a philanderer in his time. His second wife Reham, who has assessed him as “infantile”, claims to have screwed out of him several confessions regarding his affairs in India, including with married women. She does not name her, but one of his crushes was Bollywood acress Zeenat Aman.
In a talk with a Pakistani media outlet some time back, Imran had childishly spoken about Indian women aping Western culture and fashions. “They are dark, but their TV anchors and film actresses paint themselves to look fair,” he had said. Did he also have the dark beauty Zeenat Aman in his mind? He almost married her, it is said.
Reham, the British-Pakistani TV anchor, in her memoir “Reham Khan”, tells of Imran’s long “spiritual” sessions with his newfound love Bushra Maneka, aka Bushra Peerni, as she would wait outside. Bushra is now Imran’s third official wife. In the run-up to the polls, the Deep State had prohibited the media against quoting from the book.
Amid the wide allegations that the vote has been “stolen” and that the Deep State has manipulated it to plant Imran, his party says that that those making the charges are “supporters of India”.
(The writer is a Senior Journalist)
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