The Subcontinent’s Enfant Terrible

Amitava Mukherjee

(Amitava Mukherjee can be reached at mitavamukherjee253@gmail.com)

Imran Khan, during his heydays as a cricketer, had once told that he used to bowl at his fastest pace whenever he played against India. Although spoken in a lighter vein, this brings out his rabid anti-India persona. On another occasion, he had given out that during the time of the India-Pakistan war in 1965 he had joined an association of adolescents in the Zaman Park area of Lahore. Members of this association used to patrol the streets of the locality with bamboo poles. Their avowed objective was to clobber Indian soldiers with this primitive weapon if the Indian Army really entered Lahore with tanks and other modern weapons.

Readers, please don’t chuckle at Imran’s childishness. He and his pals were fortunate that the Indian Army did not cross the Ichhogil Canal which is, in fact, the boundary of Lahore. The entire historic city was at the mercy of Indian soldiers. Only an intervention by the Soviet Union saved Pakistan from the ignominy of losing Lahore. But Imran still remains a prisoner of the past, and he represents the civil/military elite group of Pakistan which continuously feeds the common people with a Kashmir centric anti- India jihadi rhetoric.

The ‘India Today Data Intelligence Unit’ has done an interesting research on Imran Khan. According to it, from August 5 — when the Government of India declared abrogation of Article 370 and division of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir into two separate States — to September 1 when Imran Khan tweeted 67 times, 90% of which targeted India. In these tweets, the tally of the words – Kashmir, Kashmiri(s) and the IOK (Indian occupied Kashmir) — was 76 times giving a clear impression of how the Pakistani Prime Minister is trying to make the Kashmir situation a tool for his own political survival. But in doing so, he has committed so much of faux pas that it is now an open question as to whether he will be able to make Kashmir any issue in the forthcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting on the 27th of this month.

Let us take into account the false steps that he has taken. Immediately after the abrogation of Article 370, Imran came down heavily on the Indian government and had said that this would result in more Pulwama-like attacks (when 40 CRPF personnel were murdered due to terrorist attack). His reaction unambiguously brought to the fore the nexus between the Pakistani deep State and several terror networks operating in J&K. Moreover, he failed to realize that his championing of Article 370 straightway acknowledged the Constitutional validity of the Jammu and Kashmir’s accession into and existence within the Indian Union. He makes repeated reference to a ‘probable future ethnic cleansing’ in the J&K, but it smacks of his lack of knowledge of history. He was obviously referring to the winding up of Article 35A which so long had prohibited outsiders from acquiring immovable assets in the J&K. And, had there been any intention of ‘ethnic cleansing’ then the first logical and commensurate step by the present Government would have been to enact legislation for denying employments to the Kashmiris in other parts of India. This has not been done. But, Imran chose to overlook this point. This has reduced his arguments to mere slogan shoutings.

But there is a pattern behind this sloppiness. Imran has recently lost a friend and capable Minister in Asad Umar and is on a strained relationship with Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Foreign Minister. Asad Umar had stoutly opposed Imran’s decision to seek IMF loan. Similarly, Shah Mehmood Qureshi also enjoys cold relations with Imran off and on. Even the blistering autobiography of Reham Khan, Imran’s second wife, is never hard on Asad Umar and drops enough hints of Qureshi’s distance from the Tehreek-i-Insaf chief. This has deprived Imran of valuable advices. On one occasion, Shah Mehmood Quresh openly doubted advisability of war with India. On top of everything he has publicly acknowledged, inadvertently or not, Jammu and Kashmir to be a part of India.

Now Imran has no other way but to whip up a frenzy among the Pakistani people on the Kashmir issue as all his election promises are now coming croppers. He won the last election on the promise of a turnaround of the economy and to free the country from corruption. In an atmosphere in Pakistan where democracy often takes leaves, feudalism dominates and Army reigns supreme, corruption has become a common word in public life. It is true that Imran has sent two former Prime Ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Shahid Khakan Abbasi, and also former President Asif Ali Zardari to jail on corruption charges. But given the closeness of the Army, the Executive and the Judiciary in Pakistan such arrests have given rise to more questions than they have been able to answer.

Under such a circumstance, developments in the J&K have provided Imran with an alibi and he is trying to make use of it for covering up his economic failures. He squanders the opportunity to set right the ailing financial health of Pakistan, or he is perhaps unable to do a course correction. A United Nations Commission’s report has calculated Pakistan’s GDP growth rate in 2019 to be a mere 4.2 per cent and predicts that in 2020 it will plummet to 4 per cent while its bête noir India is expected to grow by 7.5 per cent in 2019. According to the State Bank of Pakistan, Islamabad is burdened with a public debt of 27.1 trillion rupees this year and it is showing signs of continuous increase.

So the Pakistani Prime Minister is in utter confusion; and this is reflected in his Kashmir policy. He refers to the Indian Prime Minister as a ‘small man’, crosses all limits by calling the present day India as a Hindu chauvinist State and tries to communalize the whole situation by accusing that India is perpetrating genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kashmir without admitting the massive human rights violations that Pakistan is carrying out in Baluchistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. On one occasion, he drops threats of a nuclear war on the Kashmir issue and soon after says that war cannot be any solution.

All these are results of his isolation at the international arena. Nowhere in international fora, has he received unstinted support for his Kashmir policy. He is trying desperately to internationalize the issue. But a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council described Kashmir to be a bilateral matter between India and Pakistan. Even China, Pakistan’s best friend, is hedging. The Sino-Pakistan joint statement at the end of the visit by the Chinese Foreign Minister to Pakistan a few days back only referred to the ‘ unilateral actions’ by India in Kashmir but stopped short of condemning it. A section of the national and international media erroneously described it to be China’s support to Pakistan. But in effect it was Beijing’s diplomatic restraint on the issue.

Except Turkey no other Muslim country has come out in support of Pakistan. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) refused to toe Imran Khan’s line. The UAE and Bahrain have bestowed their highest civilian honour to Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister. All these frustrated the Pakistani Prime Minister so much that he has described a majority of the Muslim countries’ unwillingness to toe the Pakistani line to be a result of their roaring business relations with New Delhi.

In his own way Bilawal Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), has summed up the situation thus, “Our Kashmir policy earlier was how to capture Srinagar but under Imran Khan… our policy is how to save Muzaffarabad (capital of the Pakistan occupied Kashmir— POK)”.

Also Read: Pakistan PM Imran Khan to Lead Kashmir Solidarity Rally in PoK