The PM and the speech

Before leaving for the US to speak at the United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Imran Khan had said that he would present the case of Jammu & Kashmir in a way never done before.

And he was true to his word. Imran Khan spoke with passion, but there was also logic in what he said. He was articulate, drawing comparisons with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an orator par excellence. The speech contained solid arguments with a right mix of issues of faith that need to be respected and the modern challenges such as climate change, money-laundering and Islamophobia that require adequate attention from world organizations and the developed Western world.

There was a veiled threat that things could go wrong if the flashpoint issue of Kashmir pitting two nuclear-armed neighbours against each other isn’t taken seriously and resolved in time by the United Nations and other international organizations. Though he posed a valid question as to how a country like Pakistan which is seven times smaller than neighbouring India is supposed to react if faced with the choice to surrender or fight for freedom till death, his warning that anything could happen if a conventional war starts between the two countries would have alarmed many countries and people.

It is obvious that Pakistan’s prime minister wanted to convey precisely such a message to highlight the seriousness of the situation in the wake of India’s aggressive actions in Jammu & Kashmir and the Line of Control. However, many countries and individuals may not have liked the use of words about the likelihood of a nuclear war that could endanger places far beyond the Subcontinent. As they say, you reap what you sow.

Imran Khan has come a long way from his brief victory speech as the captain of the Pakistan cricket team that won the 1992 World Cup in Melbourne.

On that occasion, he erred by not giving due credit to his teammates for winning the premier cricket event in the world. He didn’t even mention his country, which had won the World Cup. Instead, he made it look like a personal achievement by remarking that he had finally made it by winning the cup in the twilight of his cricketing career. He had also talked about his passion to build a cancer hospital, hoping the World Cup victory would help him reach that goal. After being criticized for the lapse, Imran Khan had said public speaking wasn’t his strength and that he was unprepared for the speech.

He later continued to polish his speaking skills while collecting donations for the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, named after his mother in Lahore, and then polished his skills more after entering politics. His 22 years in the political wilderness not only taught him how to survive in Pakistan’s cut-throat politics, but also become a good orator.

A time came when he started liking making speeches, sometimes quite a few in a day. The 126-day long dharna that his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), staged in Islamabad in 2014 in a bid to topple the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N government, provided him ample time and opportunities to speak to his adoring followers in a language and style that they came to love. It is another matter that his dharna politics would haunt him since the opposition parties, led by his biggest critic, JUI-F head Maulana Fazlur Rahman, are gearing up to stage similar protests in Islamabad later this month with the stated goal to oust him from power.

The structure of Imran Khan’s rather long 45-minute speech at the United Nations General Assembly can be praised or criticized; many critics thought the Kashmir issue should have been discussed before moving on to the other three issues, including climate change, money-laundering by ruling elites and Islamophobia. He may have his reasons for structuring the extempore speech the way he did as climate change is of interest worldwide and it could have attracted international attention by focusing on it first.

The issue of money-laundering by corrupt ruling elite in developing countries and the ease with which they are able to stash it away in the Western world is also of importance at the international level even though questions could be asked as to why the anti-crime and anti-graft bodies in these states aren’t doing enough to stop this practice.

In the case of Islamophobia, Muslims are victims in the hands of various oppressors. This was the right time and the most suitable stage to highlight this issue. In fact, three Muslim leaders – Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammad and now Imran Khan – stand out in speaking fearlessly about issues due to which Muslims are suffering.

As the purpose in his ‘Mission Kashmir’ visit to the US and his speech at the UN General Assembly was to bring the Kashmir issue to the centre-stage, it would have been better to focus more on it and further expose the ideology of India’s ruling BJP and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a life-time member of the extremist RSS.

Imran Khan had done this to a large extent during his earlier engagements in the US and also largely did justice to it in his UN General Assembly speech, focusing more on Kashmir and human rights violations in the Indian-occupied valley with specific examples would have done no harm. Rather, he had room to talk as much on Kashmir as possible; interestingly, Modi earlier in his speech had deliberately opted not to mention Kashmir at all.

Obviously, it was an insensitive and failed effort on Modi’s part to ignore the realities of Kashmir.

The writer is resident editor of The News in Peshawar.

Email: rahimyusufzai@yahoo.com