SherAli Tareen - There's no reason to fear Pakistan's new prime minister
The lead-up to
philanthropist turned politician Imran Khan's election as Pakistan's new Prime
Minister generated copious alarming prognostications across international
media. These vilifying accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. Rest
assured, the sky is not falling in Pakistan. To the contrary, Khan's decisive
victory represents a monumental moment in the country's checkered history.
The dominant
international narrative, stitched together by self-professed foreign experts
such as Indian journalist Burkha Dutt and Sadanand Dhume of the American
Enterprise Institute, followed these lines: the Pakistani election represents a
battle between puppets of the Pakistani military establishment, exemplified by
the figure of Imran Khan, and champions of democracy such as the recently
convicted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The corruption scandals
engulfing Sharif, this narrative held, represent the product of a conniving
campaign engineered and executed by the military, in cahoots with the
judiciary, to punish Sharif for his efforts to mend relations with India.
Dhume, in a
recent Wall
Street Journal piece, went so far as to say that Khan is
"playing a fixed match," and that Sharif had been
"railroaded." No doubt, the monstrosities of the Pakistani
military, past and present, are indefensible. However, viewing Pakistani
politics solely through the lens of a pro/anti-military binary is egregiously reductive.
The
Panama documents, which exposed Sharif's and his family's off-shore
companies and millions of pounds worth of properties in the UK, were not the
military's making. The ensuing legal saga that led to the former premiere's
jail sentence lasted almost two years.
Dhume conveniently
overlooks how during this period, Sharif and his family behaved criminally with
false and contradictory statements, forgeries, legal obfuscations, fake letters
from Qatari princes, and refusals to answer a simple question: where
did the money come from? These shenanigans amply to demonstrate that
massive corruption represents the only viable explanation for Sharif's
otherwise unexplained mountain of wealth. Why would a person who has not
committed any corruption try so hard to obstruct proceedings of law? That the
properties in question were bought in the early 1990s, precisely when Sharif was
at the helm of power, only confirm the corruption that enabled them.
Hence, skeptics within
and outside Pakistan, who argue that corruption against Sharif has not been
proven, are wrong. It is more accurate to say that the precise mechanism of
corruption has not yet been fully detailed. The murderer stands in front of the
corpse with a bloodied dagger; how the dagger entered the victim is all that is
left to be established.
The results of the
election also mitigate strongly against the notion of military engineering. The
outcome generally followed pre-election opinion polls, with the undecideds
breaking heavily for Khan in the last few days. In fact, some heavy-weight candidates suspected
to have been backed by the military actually lost. Moreover, voter turn-out was
historically high, especially among women, and in the smaller provinces often
disenchanted by electoral politics.
Critics also suggest
Imran Khan is dangerous not only because of being in bed with the military, but
because of his regular invocation of Islam on the campaign trail and his close
ties with religious groups in the country. This simplistic view is partial
and misleading; it reflects a less than nuanced understanding of the current
political dynamics in Pakistan. Moreover, it rather insidiously aims to
discredit a populist leader whose politics do not neatly fit Western and Indian
neo-liberal expectations and priorities. Imran Khan's
popularity that propelled him to victory comes at vindication of his more than
two-decade long argument that Sharif and Asif Zardari, leader of
the Pakistan People's Party, the other major Pakistani political outfit, were
drenched in corruption.
But a more important
factor that explains Khan's attraction, especially among the urban youth, is
the impressive performance of his Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaf/Justice Movement
party or PTI in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwah (KP) that it ruled the last
five years. The PTI's most notable achievements were de-politicization of
the police, unprecedented health-care coverage for low-income households,
record enrollments in government schools, and a successful drive to plant a
billion trees. People of the KP province have never re-elected an incumbent
government and yet, Khan's PTI not only won re-election but by a significantly
bigger margin than before. Clearly, such popular support is not the military's
work.
On the issue of Khan's
proximity to religious hardliners, this again is a mis-directed concern. The
two central pillars anchoring his long-running position on militancy have been:
1) terrorism cannot be rooted out through military force alone, but also must
involve political solutions through dialogue, and 2) the disturbances and
displacements generated by the U.S. war on terror are intimately tied to the
recent explosion of militant violence in Pakistan. These positions might be
unpopular in some quarters, but they are hardly extremist or reactionary. Moreover,
invoking Islam and prophetic ideals of justice is a common feature in Pakistani
politics; this is hardly a cause for concern and criticism.
Though it is curious
to note the disproportionate alarm that often accompanies invocations of
religion by politicians in Muslim majority countries; organizations like the
American Enterprise Institute seemed much less bothered by the compassionate
Christian conservatism of a recent US president who waged a war that maimed
thousands of Iraqis and Americans. Is this not hypocrisy?
Given the massive
corruption and fulsome hereditary politics that mark his rivals, it's easy to
see Imran Khan's election to the premiership as a welcome prospect for both the
people of Pakistan and for global stakeholders.
https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2018/07/theres_no_reason_to_fear_pakis.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pennlive_sfWhat is corruption?
