Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan, in a dramatic turn of events on Tuesday, was arrested outside Islamabad High Court in connection with a Rs 50 billion ($611 million) corruption scandal dubbed as Al-Qadir Trust case.
Khan is only the latest among a number of former Pakistani prime ministers who have circumvented the cycle between Islamabad’s Prime Minister’s Office to an ‘undisclosed location’ after arrest, throwing the spotlight on the supposed role of the country’s deep state into running Pakistan’s corridors of power.
Imran Khan arrest: Sequence of events
On Saturday, May 6, Imran Khan at a political gathering in Lahore, said that an officer in Pakistan Inter-Services and Intelligence (ISI) was involved in an assassination attempt on him last November.
Khan identified the ISI officer as Major-General Faisal Naseer.
Two days later, on Monday (May 8), the Pakistani military warned Imran Khan against making ‘baseless allegations’, a sentiment that was echoed by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as part of his reasoning behind justifying Khan’s arrest after his predecessor was whisked away by men in uniform from Islamabad High Court on Tuesday.
The arrests in corruption cases in Pakistan are conventionally made by the Rawalpindi-headquartered anti-corruption department National Accountability Bureau.
But hours after Khan’s arrest, Islamabad High Court’s Chief Justice Aamer Farooq acknowledged that while the arrest warrant was issued by the NAB, “Khan was not arrested by the NAB”, adding that the PTI chief was whisked away by Pakistan Rangers and not Islamabad Police.
The above sequence of events put into spotlight the much-anticipated role of Pakistan’s ISI in the country’s politics.
While Islamabad is Pakistan’s capital, it is Rawalpindi – the location of Pakistan’s military and intelligence headquarters – which calls the shots.
Pakistan’s powerful military-intelligence nexus, collectively dubbed as establishment, has directly ruled the country for three decades since it became independent from the British after a bitter partition from India.
At present, the ISI’s extent of control over Pakistan’s state of affairs is reflected in the fact that soon after succeeding Imran Khan after a no-trust-vote, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif gave the ISI spy agency vetting power over civil service appointments.
Pakistan’s ISI and politics: How ‘angels’ rule India’s western neighbour?
Plainclothes ISI operatives can be found in towns and cities across Pakistan, “low-key but ubiquitous, like pigeons on a power line”, Declan Walsh, former Islamabad correspondent for New York Times writes in his critically-acclaimed portrait of India’s western neighbour, titled, The Nine Lives of Pakistan.
In Urdu, Pakistanis call the ISI’s men farishtay, or angels – a double-edged euphemism that refers both to the traditional white long-shirts typically worn by ISI men and to the vast uncircumscribed powers at their disposal.
“When the ISI men come to the door, the illusion of a democratic state melts away. Nobody can stop them – no judge, no lawyer, no ambassador, not even a minister. The angels rule,” Walsh writes further, reflecting on the semblance of democracy that exists in Islamabad’s corridors of power well within ISI’s control.
On Tuesday, once again, the ‘angels’ asserted their rule in Pakistan’s corridors of power, as Imran Khan was whisked away under the nose of the country’s judiciary, with Islamabad Police’s Inspector General pointing out that he found out about Khan’s arrest only through media.
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