From Khan to Khan, Pakistan has paid a price
Imran Khan Niazi was once the face of a future stable, democratic Pakistan. In these past few years since he was catapulted to power --- some say by the powerful army --- he has squandered the goodwill that was his.
Under his Tehrik-e-Insaf-led government, Pakistan has lurched from one economic problem to another. Inflation is beyond control, prices of daily necessities have gone through the roof, political incompetence has been a stark reality.
It therefore made sense for the political opposition, united under a large tent of conservatives, liberals and centrists, to ask for a vote of confidence on the record of the government in the country's national assembly. Imran Khan, had he been a proper democrat, would have followed the constitution and gone through the process of the vote in parliament.
He abjured that path and adopted a clear attitude of belligerence, despite the writing on the wall. His own party loyalists deserted him, which was embarrassing enough. His coalition partners began to walk away from him.
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But that did little to have Khan uphold the norms of democracy. On his advice, President Arif Alvi has dissolved the national assembly, a move which swiftly followed the step by the deputy speaker of the assembly to disallow a vote on the no-confidence motion on the spurious ground that loyalty to the country was paramount.
Khan and his friends deliberately ignored the question of loyalty to the constitution. And in this reprehensible task, President Alvi went along with them, pushing Pakistan into a new era of uncertainty.
It is rather curious that Pakistan has historically suffered since its creation under successive Khans. And what the present Khan, Imran, has just done is simply emulate them and in the process pit Pakistanis against a condition the ramifications of which, at this stage, can only be foretold as horrendous.
It all began with the country's first prime minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, whose frontal assault on the demand that Bengali be included as one of the languages in the constituent assembly in 1948 was the earliest sign of a Khan giving short shrift to democratic aspirations.
Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in October 1951, which in effect was a hint of how politics in Pakistan would go from bad to worse. The worse, at that early stage in the country's history, came through a commandeering of the state by General Mohammad Ayub Khan, the army commander-in-chief.
Ayub perfected the machinery that would systematically muzzle aspirations for democracy in the country. His decade-long hold on power was in essence rule by him and his satraps, all Khans on a smaller scale.
Malik Amir Mohammad Khan was a fearsome presence as governor of what was then West Pakistan; and in East Pakistan it was the unquestioning loyalist Abdul Monem Khan who cheerfully went along with his president's wishes. A third Khan, the Bengali Khan A. Sabur, remained a powerful minister in the Ayub regime right till the end.
The damage that Ayub Khan and those lesser Khans did to Pakistan was immense, to a point where it was beginning to be argued as to whether the two wings of the country would manage to cling to each other as a single country. Ayub understood the fissures he had caused to develop and left before he could preside over the break-up of the country. But he left that job to the next Khan, the army chief General Yahya Khan.
The new Khan on the block went cheerfully and busily into dismantling the state, beginning the odious job through repudiating the results of the country's very first general election, taking the leader of the majority party into detention on charges of treason and subjecting Bengalis to a nine-month trail of genocide.
There have been the Khans who have periodically undermined the state of Pakistan. General Tikka Khan has gone down in history as the butcher of both Balochistan and Bangladesh. Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi spoke of changing the genes of Bengalis through having his soldiers rape Bengali women (hum unn ke nasl badal denge --- we will change their generations, he vowed in 1971). Rao Farman Ali Khan's name is forever linked to the murder of Bengali intellectuals.
In the post-Ziaul Haq period, a bureaucratic Khan was only too eager to turf out the elected government of Benazir Bhutto. He was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, whose camaraderie with army chief Aslam Baig re-inaugurated the modalities by which democracy would be pushed toward a new abyss.
And now the new Khan, once a star cricketer who as politician was looked upon by Pakistanis as the future, has muddled up things. He has undiplomatically charged the United States with conspiracy to bring down his government, has publicly demeaned his rivals in the opposition as traitors, has gone into arguments with his benefactor the army and now has violated the constitution in order to hang on to power.
He had earlier promised, in cricket parlance, to play till the last ball in his battle with the opposition. He reneged on that promise, choosing instead to go unabashedly against constitutional principles. His was a sledgehammer blow that has left Pakistani politics grievously wounded.
Imran Khan has now gone down in history as the man who, in civilian garb, is happy to follow in the footsteps of all the earlier Khans in Pakistan's political history. He has demeaned himself, diminished himself.
He has demonstrated in brazen manner that clinging to power through an exercise of authoritarian fiat is a whole lot more satisfying for him than informing Pakistanis that their efforts to give to themselves a democratic system of political governance is of the essence.
Perhaps the Supreme Court will overrule President Alvi's act of dissolving the national assembly. Perhaps Imran Khan will, without a shred of embarrassment, continue to hang on to power. Who knows?
The larger truth is that Imran Khan, often derisively referred to as a selected rather than elected prime minister, has stabbed Pakistan in the back. But then, he has simply done what all those earlier Khans did to the country.
By the way, there have been the good, wise Khans Pakistanis do not much remember these days. Think of Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, Asghar Khan, Azam Khan and Nur Khan. They were a different breed.
