Found guilty of corruption by an Islamabad sessions court, former Prime Minister Imran Khan is finally behind bars, but it is still too soon to write him off as a potent political force. Here is why.
By Ahmer Kureishi
Imran Khan never did have a viable defence in the Toshakhana case (as also in several other corruption cases) and the heart-throb politician knew it. The strategy his legal team charted and followed to a T amply demonstrates as much. They focused their energies on thwarting the trial rather than defending their client. But the trial inexorably progressed, and reached its inevitable conclusion.
Khan can and will appeal his conviction in the High Court and then in the Supreme Court, and his conviction will become final only after he has exhausted these appeals. As such, irrespective of how watertight the case against him is, Khan will likely be bailed out soon after filing his first appeal pending the High Court ruling on the matter.
Still, his aura of invulnerability has been damaged, and this is a serious setback for a leader who has invested heavily in building his larger than life mystique among his followers. On the other hand, it will be a grave mistake to write Khan as a political force to reckon with in the months and years ahead.
To read the tea leaves on Khan’s political future, we have to first take into account the nature of his struggle and estimate the potency of the relative forces stacked for and against that cause within the Pakistani polity.
Without going into the deep background, a mere look at Khan’s struggle since his ouster from power in April 2022 lays bare that he is waging a war on the silent revolution that has been dubbed as the Great Reset: The military’s newfound resolution to stay out of politics.
What is more, there are plenty of signs to establish that Khan’s backers in this struggle – apart from duped commoners who see in him a messiah – are entrenched power elites who benefited from the old order.
This includes everybody in business and politics living on the rich dividends of the military’s involvement in politics. A mafia-like network of patronage depending on the military’s primacy in all spheres of life is central to this enterprise.
The hub of this network is constituted by former general officers sitting in the boardrooms of military-owned businesses with unfettered access to all levels of the military command from the GHQ down to the smallest formation.
Its spokes are military contractors who have become tycoons by building vast business empires; a vast network of enforcers including former military types stretching out its tentacles to the furthest corners of the country; and the so-called electables extending its influence in all institutions of the polity in return for patronage.
Needless to say, this network has the old order to thank for its very existence, and needs the old order for its continued survival. Small wonder they are not prepared to have any of the Great Reset.
While Khan is expert at couching his pronouncements in populist terms and democratic jargon, projecting himself as an opponent of military’s dominance of politics for some, it is not lost on the keen observers of his progress that his exertions have been aimed solely at forcing the military back into politics.
The long and short of it is that Khan has powerful backers who are deeply entrenched in every aspect of the Pakistani polity; who are hellbent on turning the wheel back on the Great Reset; and who are prepared to fight the long fight and fight as dirty as they have to.
What is more, the old guard have pre-positioned their propaganda assets abroad to keep the fight going when the going gets tough. Now that Khan has been taken off the street, those assets continue to dutifully churn out the predetermined messaging designed to keep the country’s political environment on the boil.
Khan’s backers will stay at this game for as long as they have to but retreat is not an option because on the line is their very survival. Their ultimate hope is to flip the incumbent army chief (or his successor) to their side.
Meanwhile, they will do everything in their power to bring back Khan, all laws and courts be damned. And with their help, there is no telling when the silver-tongued demagogue may succeed in spinning his conviction into a kind of political martyrdom.
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