Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was shot last week at a political procession he had held as part of his agitation against the government led by PM Shehbaz Sharif. The assailant has said that he intended to kill Khan for leading Pakistanis ashtray. However, he succeeded only in lionising his target, Unherd reported.
Writing for Unherd, Kapil Komireddi said that the supporters of Imran Khan are trying to make his survival as evidence of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman’s superhuman qualities. In the report, he said that Khan remains one of the “most pernicious political personalities” across the world today.
Imran Khan assumed office as Prime Minister in 2018 in a vote that Pakistan’s human rights commission described as the “blatant, aggressive and unabashed” interference of his sponsors in Pakistan’s military, as per the report. The military of Pakistan has governed the nation directly or indirectly.
Kapil Komireddi in the report said opponents of Imran Khan were harried and intimidated and many Pakistanis viewed the election as a “soft coup.” Despite the support of Pakistan’s military, Imran Khan-led PTI failed to secure a majority in parliament and formed a coalition government.
In the report, he argued that Pakistan’s military denied the majority to Khan in a bid to keep him in check. According to Kapil Komireddi, Imran Khan changed his image from “dimwitted tabloid fodder in the West” to a “chillingly prudish regurgitator of anti-Western bromides in Pakistan” which eventually led him to the reward he wanted to have.
Imran Khan as Prime Minister committed to turning Pakistan into a new Medina. He married Bushra Bibi for his third marriage which Kapil Komireddi described “a fully veiled clairvoyant who claimed to have had visions of his triumphs and subordinated his temporal duties to the task of establishing himself as the champion of the Islamic ummah.”
Kapil Komireddi wrote that issues of ordinary Pakistani citizens became the least of Imran Khan’s concerns after he took over as Prime Minister. The report said that Imran Khan regularly criticised the West and other non-Muslim government for their treatment of his co-religionists. He pushed a resolution through parliament criticising French President Emanuel Macron for victimising Muslim minorities in the nation.
As per the Unherd report, Imran Khan described Indian democracy as a sham and all of India as the “21st-century avatar of Nazi Germany for the depredations of the Hindu-supremacist regime of Narendra Modi.” On the other hand, Khan did not speak about the concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang where millions of Muslims suffer torture, the report added.
In the end, Pakistan’s military and Imran Khan were not on the same page. Imran Khan travelling to Moscow as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s guest on the day when Russia launched an offensive in Ukraine did not go well with the Pakistani military. Kapil Komireddi mentioned, “The ringmasters had treated him as a pliable monkey; but he, addled by power, was going rogue and threatening to burn down the lucrative circus they had built.”
Amid the rift between the Pakistan Army and Imran Khan, opposition parties called for a vote of confidence in April. Khan claimed that Pakistan’s army was “colluding” with his political rivals. At the time, the military did not come to the rescue of Pakistan’s PM. Eventually, Khan was ousted from power by a vote in parliament.
After his ouster from office, the PTI chief claimed that the US and its agents in Pakistan had planned it. A significant section of society considered Imran Khan as a “soldier of Islam and a victim of its enemies.” The Imran Khan-led party won a series of bye-elections in Pakistan. Later in October, the Election Commission of Pakistan disqualified Khan from membership in parliament and banned them from holding public office for five years.