If Imran Khan Niazi had a guardian angel, he couldn’t have planned this David versus Goliath battle any better. A politician who feeds off public adulation and is adept at playing the victim, Imran was hustled out of court by a posse of brute paramilitary forces, unceremoniously shoved into a vehicle and taken away.
That was on May 9, deemed a ‘Black Day’ by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as the Imran Khan faithful, armed with little more than sticks and petrol bombs, attacked upscale garrison towns across the nuclear-armed nation, the scale of violence unseen in a country where the Army has long called the shots.
As Pakistan teeters on the brink of anarchy and the Army dusts off plans for a civilian-led emergency rule, if not Martial Law itself if the situation spirals out of control, Imran on Friday threw in the match of another assassination attempt, aimed at setting off another conflagration.
Prime Minister Sharif red-flagged the dangers posed by Imran and his Tehreek-e-Insaf party stoking anger against the civilian-military establishment. Tamping down on that mob fury is not going to be easy for Shehbaz, or the Army under new chief Gen. Asim Munir.
By taking on Pakistan’s powerful Army in Pathan-dominated Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in Balochistan where soldiers have been attacked, the Punjab heartland and the port city of Karachi where there is a sizeable Pathan population, Imran has set the stage for a confrontation that could prod the Army into reassessing the merits of playing just puppeteer.
When PM Nawaz Sharif was shunted out of office and a fraudulent election brought Imran to office under Sharif’s bete noire Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, there was barely a whimper. The Bajwa constitutional coup that toppled Imran in April 2022, however, unleashed an Imran-led tornado. The battle, fought on the streets this week in the wake of Imran’s arrest, is a direct result of the falling out between Bajwa and Imran. But, unlike previous Army chiefs who blithely toppled civilian leaders, Gen.
Munir seems unsure of the way forward. Reluctant to cut Imran off at the knees, he’s waited five months before making a move, unwilling to break the promise of non-interference in the political domain. But he may have miscalculated. Imran’s verbal barrage has driven a wedge within the Army itself, with top generals—some say, led by Chief of General Staff Gen. Sahir Shamshad Mirza—challenging Gen. Munir on how to tackle the Imran insurrection. Gen. Munir’s shock sacking of the Corps Commanders of Lahore, Bahawalpur and Quetta, with Rawalpindi reportedly imminent, shows the Army’s concern over its soldiers’ refusal to confront the mobs. The Rawalpindi Corps Commander at Army GHQ, reportedly an Imran sympathiser, vacated his official home hours before the attack.
Pakistan’s streets have not erupted in this manner, at least not since the 2007–08 lawyers’ protests against then President Pervez Musharraf after he ordered the attack on Lal Masjid. Given the close links that Imran’s PTI has with pro-Taliban Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other terror militia that operate in the Afghan-Pakistan badlands, there is concern not just within Pakistan, but in Washington, London and Delhi, over the mobs overrunning Pakistan’s nuclear bases.
The PTI supremo does have Pakistan’s Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial batting for him, with a face-off between elements of a pro-Imran judiciary and the anti-Imran civilian-military dispensation, only complicating matters. These are fault lines which run deep in a country fractured by conflicting power centres that have perennially jostled for the upper hand. Civilian political leaders, elected or imposed, rarely had a full term. Imran’s theatrics are certainly far wilier than one would have given the former cricketer credit for, with his adroit manipulation of followers on social media catching the Army brass napping, raising the prospects of a Pakistan Arab Spring.
Will that end? While the Army has cut off internet facilities, it has held back from using anything more than water cannons to keep protesters at bay so far. The Sharif government may have allowed PTI mobs to vent steam, so that it can use the PTI-engineered protests as a justification to impose civilian emergency rule, which would be one step short of Martial Law, with Shehbaz or a trusted aide taking over as caretaker prime minister until elections next year.
This would continue to perpetuate the image of a civilian government calling the shots, while keeping the Army out of the picture and not allowing elections that Imran would most probably sweep—unless the cases against him deem him ineligible to stand. Certainly, in a sign that the long rope given to Imran is at an end, the top echelons of the PTI were taken into custody overnight. While courts granted him bail in the Toshakhana case where Imran and his wife are charged with selling watches gifted to the State, and a similar bail reprieve in the PRS 530 m Al Qadir Trust case, how long can Chief Justice Bandial, with barely three to four months left in office, stave off the inevitable?
An economic bailout by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank is predicated on a peaceful Pakistan that addresses its economic woes with a promised $3 billion bailout by long-standing allies and mentors, Saudi Arabia and UAE. Imran’s potential to derail the country with street protests is a key factor behind plans to incarcerate him, an attempt to roll back the fanatical following that the cricketer-turned-politician has in the country. It also comes on the heels of an amendment to the Constitution, which states that once an investigation is complete, the National Accountability Bureau can initiate an arrest of the accused.
But insiders believe his repeated naming of a serving officer in the Inter-Services Intelligence, whom he’s nicknamed “Dirty Harry”, may have been the last straw for Gen. Munir. Imran accused the country’s counter intelligence agency’s number two, Major Gen. Faisal Naseer, of having allegedly bumped off journalist Arshad Sharif for investigating the military’s role in the no-confidence motion that voted out Imran’s government. “He’s tried to kill me twice,” Imran says in the video.
Facing an unprecedented challenge to its power, the military must rue nurturing the ‘Anarchist’, the only political leader with the moxy to challenge their might and push Pakistan to the brink of this political abyss.
Neena Gopal
Foreign policy analyst and author
(neenagopal@gmail.com)