At long last: Prime Minister Imran Khan 

Rajan Philips-July 28, 2018, 6:05 pm

Winning the World Cup in cricketwas a much easier task for Imran Khan. That was in 1992, in Melbourne, Australia. He was 40 years old then, took on Pakistan’s captaincy on his terms for team selection, and played a captain’s role as an all-rounder throughout the tournament and most memorably in the final against England. Along with Richard Hadlee (New Zealand), Kapil Dev (India) and Ian Botham (England), Imran Khan was one of four in a generation of all-time great cricket all-rounders. In a fast bowling contest during his playing days, Imran Khan was ranked the third fastest bowler after two fast balling greats: Australia’s Jeff Thomson and West Indian Michael Holding.

Four years after the Melbourne World Cup, Imran Khan entered politics in Pakistan, launching a new party - Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI – Pakistan Party for Justice), and vowing to rid Pakistan of corruption. His and his Party’s first electoral test came one year later, in 1997. It was a rout. Imran Khan called his then wife, Jemima Goldsmith, on the phone and said, "It’s a clean sweep". After a pause, as she gasped, he added, "the other way," and roared with laughter. That was the sportsman’s sense of humour and the ability to treat "triumph and defeat … just the same." In the 21 years that followed, Imran Khan showed his true mettle. As Ms. Goldsmith tweeted in congratulation after Imran Khan’s impressive electoral victory last week, "It’s an incredible lesson in tenacity, belief and refusal to accept defeat." Genuinely proud to see her son’s father at long last become Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Ms. Goldsmith added, "The challenge now is to remember why he entered politics in the first place." Indeed!

The reactions to Khan’s victory have been wide and varied within Pakistan and outside. There is euphoria among his party supporters, especially among the Pakistani youth, called ‘youthias’ in Pakistan, a country of 212 million people with 30% under the age 10 and 65% under 30 years of age. The two mainstream parties, Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which have exchanged power between them for the last 30 years have called the 2018 elections the worst rigged election in history. Khan also has been accused of being the favoured ‘Prime Minister’ of the Pakistani military and civilian establishments. In India, sections of the media have called him a "Bollywood villain", and resurrected the old insult of him as "Taliban Khan." An American commentator has opined that "the next Prime-Minister of nuclear-armed Pakistan really hates the US."

There is some truth in all of this although the characterization in India of Imran Khan as a "Bollywood villain’ might be more reflective of those close to the Modi government than the mainstream media and commentators generally in India. It is also true, however, that all past elections in Pakistan have been rigged and it has been a job requirement for every previous Pakistani Prime Minister to be in the good books of the military. Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Muslim League (PML-N), who has been the longest serving Prime Minister since independence, owes his first induction in office, in 1990, to the military’s intervention and the removal of Benazir Bhutto who had been elected Prime Minister only two years earlier. Sharif ran foul of the military and was removed by General Musharraf in a military coup in 1999. He returned as PM after winning the general election in 2013 but was not able to complete his term ending in 2018. In July 2017, the Supreme Court disqualified Sharif to hold public office for life, over an offshore investments scandal that came to light with the leaking of the Panama Papers. He and his daughter are also serving prison sentences now. Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, stepped in place of his brother as the leader of the PML-N and presided over the party’s defeat last week.

The disqualification and imprisonment of Sharif was seen by some Pakistani observers as the result of the military and the judiciary colluding to get rid of Sharif. The same observers have been calling the 2018 elections as a setup for Imran Khan’s victory. But that does not explain or do justice to the nearly 55 million voters who turned out to vote just as they had done in 2013 under similar circumstances. That was the first time when Pakistan experienced a civilian succession of power - from the Bhutto’s People’s Party led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, to Sharif’s Muslim League. Last week’s election makes it the second time Pakistan has experienced electoral succession. When the courts ruled against him, Nawaz Sharif left Pakistan to his safe house in Saudi Arabia and returned during the elections expecting to create a massive sympathy wave among the voters in favour of his party. There was no wave at all, not even in Punjab that has been the Sharif brothers’ and the PML-N’s main electoral bastion. Imran Khan’s PTI did very well even in Punjab. Overall, the contest was not even close to call PTI’s success a rigged victory.

Imran Khan has dismissed allegations of large scale vote rigging and has called this year’s election as the "fairest" in Pakistan’s history. But he has agreed to assist anyone wanting to investigate specific instances of fraud or irregularities. Mr. Khan knows that it was he who set the precedent for protesting against election rigging and rejecting election results as he did with his Azadi march against the 2013 elections. This time, the defeated PML-N has declared that despite its misgivings the party will not challenge the overall results and will accept the outcome of the elections for the sake of democracy. That clears the way for Imran Khan to become Pakistan’s Prime Minister at long last.

Imran Khan’s victory and its challenges

Khan’s and the PTI’s victory has exceeded expectations. Based on the results released at the time of writing, PTI has won 115 of the elected total of 272 seats in the National Assembly. (The National Assembly has a total of 342 members, with 70 more members added proportionately to the elected seats won by each party to give representation to women (60) and minority groups (10)). The ruling PML-N managed only 64 seats, the PPP 43 seats, the smaller parties 32 seats and independents 13 seats. Although short of the 137 majority of elected representatives, the PTI can easily form a coalition with any of the smaller parties or independents without having to get into horse-trading with PML-N or PPP.

The PTI’s victory is even more impressive because of its national reach and good performances in each of the four Provinces of Punjab (141 seats), Sindh (61), Khyber Pakkhtunkhwa (39), Baluchistan (16). (The remaining 15 seats are distributed between the Islamabad Capital Territory (3) and Federally Administered Areas (12)). The PML-N has always been a Punjabi party and Punjab alone, with 141 seats, can elect a majority government for the country. The PPP of the Bhuttos has been Pakistan’s only national party, but it is now reduced to a rural force in the Province of Sindh, the home of the Bhuttos. Now, Imran Khan’s PTI has taken over the mantle of being a national party.

For all its political predicaments, Pakistan has got its electoral organization right. Elections are held simultaneously for the National and the Provincial Assemblies, rather than holding them selectively and separately as is done in Sri Lanka. Imran Khan’s PTI did well in the Provincial elections also and is poised to form provincial governments in Punjab and Khyber Pakkhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Territories). PTI will be the leading opposition party in the other two provinces.

In his first public address from his home after the elections, Imran Khan attempted to answer the criticisms levelled at him in Pakistan and elsewhere. He clarified why he entered politics in the first place. "Politics could not have given me anything", he said. "I wanted Pakistan to become the country that my leader Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah had dreamed of." He envisioned a state that would be like the "state that was established in Madina, where widows and the poor were taken care of." "Today our state is in shambles. [But] all our policies aim to help the less fortunate prosper" the Prime Minister elect added."Farmers are not paid for their hard work, 25 million children are out of school, our women continue to die in childbirth because we can't give them basic healthcare, we can't give the people clean drinking water. A country is not recognized by the lifestyle of the rich, but by the lifestyle of the poor. No country that has an island of rich people and a sea of poor people can prosper."

He claimed that he had "suffered the worst kind of personal attacks" unlike any other political leader in Pakistan. But "this is all behind me now", he assured as he embarks on building the Naya (a new) Pakistan of his campaign promise. His stated priorities at home are about governing for the benefit of ordinary citizens; much better managing of government finances; strengthening institutions and institutionalizing accountability; emphasizing youth employment and supporting farmers and businesses; investing in development. As Prime Minister, Imran Khan will have to lead the country through formidable economic challenges including a significant balance of payment crisis and high unemployment while navigating between meeting the demands of the IMF and expanding the economic ties with China.

Externally, Imran Khan has indicated that he looks forward to reconfiguring Pakistan’s ties with China, Afghanistan, Iran, US and India. There is some curiosity about how Imran Khan will engage with Donald Trump given the latter’s offensive attitude towards Pakistan. Some critics have compared Imran Khan to Donald Trump, because the two men appear to be putting each one’s country first. In reality, there is a difference between Trump’s ‘America First’ boast, and Imran Khan standing up for his country that is beleaguered by external forces beyond its control. It is true that Imran Khan’s predecessors and Pakistan’s military establishment have been wholly complicit in dragging Pakistan into the current regional and religious imbroglio. But it will be impossible for any Pakistani government to go to war with a section of its own people to fight international terrorism the way America wants it done. Equally, it will be impossible for any Pakistani Prime Minister to order the army into subordination just because he has won an election.

Imran Khan’s answer to dealing with the military establishment is "good governance." In his view, when democratic governments perform and deliver there will be no occasion for military intervention. In Pakistan, he said, "we have had military influence on politics because we have had the worst political governments. I am not saying it is justified but where there is a vacuum something will fill it." He went to add that "under crooked and corrupt governments, people welcome the military with open arms. In 1999 when Musharraf’s martial law was declared, people were celebrating in Lahore – Nawaz’s political centre!"He cited the premiership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as an instance of prime-ministerial strength in Pakistan when a civilian Prime Minister was "totally in charge of the country’s affairs" including the military. This may have been true in the first half of the late Mr. Bhutto’s premiership, but not in the second half - when he became unpopular, was overthrown by a military coup, was put on trial on framed up charges and was eventually hanged under orders from the then military dictator Zia-ul-Haq.

On engaging with Pakistan’s militant groups, the Prime Minister elect, remains insistent on a dual policy approach: "one is dialogue and the other is military action. I have been labeled ‘Taliban Khan’ just because I did not agree with this one-dimensional policy that Pakistan implemented under American pressure." He considers the war in Afghanistan as a classic example of how military solutions alone do not work: "The US has been there for 15 years with a military option but has failed. If there is consensus among the American and Afghan governments and allies that they want unconditional peace talks with Taliban, it means the military option has failed."

Apart from his Oxford PPE, cricketing genius, genuine popularity, capacity for teamwork and leadership abilities, Imran Khan also differs from his prime-ministerial predecessors, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, in other important respects. He is a Pashtun, born and raised in Lahore in Punjab, who went to Oxford and London to study and play. Nonetheless, Imran Khan has been able to transform himself from being an upper class sports celebrity in England into a political mass figure in Pakistan. More by circumstances than choice, Imran Khan has been, until now, involved in the politics of agitation rather than the politics of governance. For 20 years, he has grounded his agitation in the terrain of Pakistan instead of seeking safe houses in the West, like Benazir Bhutto, or in Saudi Arabia, like Nawaz Sharif. Rather than cultivating political sponsors outside, Imran Khan has relied on resources within the country, which invariably included interactions with the army and the militants and the espousal of controversially conservative social and religious practices. These differences in attributes and experiences make Imran Khan a different prospect for Pakistan than Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. No one can predict how he will fare on the sticky wicket of governing Pakistan after acquitting himself well on the firmer pitches of political agitation. All the same, Imran Khan is the country’s new hope for a new Pakistan.