Imran or Netflix: the choice is yours

While Nawaz Sharif was the prime minister, Imran Khan used to comment that Nawaz was not as innocent as he looked. Times have changed and one can say the same about Imran Khan. The difference is that, despite he being accused of all sorts of charges, nothing is sticking to him and he remains a popular leader.

The fascinating part is that he has not only been able to sustain the support of the educated classes but has also succeeded in galvanizing it at least to the extent of attending his public meetings and financially supporting him. He must be doing something right – or his opponents must be doing something terribly wrong.

There is no doubt Imran is the best communicator amongst the politicians at the moment. This was obviously not always the case and he has immensely improved. Unlike other politicians, he mostly has an outline of what he wants to say in his mind and tries to come out with something new in each jalsa which is not an easy task considering the meetings he has been addressing. He has made it into a habit to pick an idea from some random book and explain it to his audience in easy language like a teacher. The audience appears to like it.

The intriguing part is his messaging. He knows that his style and looks are popular. But he himself is unsure of what clicks with the public and he thus keeps changing it. The only constant is the ‘corruption’ of the Mian family which the PTI government was unable to prove in the 43 months of its rule which otherwise also was nothing to write home about.

Every PTI supporter vehemently claims that the Sharif family is corrupt and Imran is not. Without going into the merits of this claim, as one can write a book on it, one may ask: what does one do with Imran’s honesty considering the track record of his rule and the kind of clownish ministers he had? They explain his failures by ad nauseam repeating what Imran has been saying for the past four years: disastrous economy inherited from the previous government; Covid; and the international environment. Nothing was Imran Khan’s fault. Absolutely not.

Imran fails to realize that he could have saved his government by aggressively approaching MNAs and MPAs from Punjab when the talk of introducing a vote of no-confidence motion started to come out in the media. He acted with arrogance and instead of placating their grievances he opted for jalsas which absolutely failed to thwart his downfall. His second mistake was sticking to his seat till the ‘last ball’ despite the numbers against him: he was obviously relying on a miracle or a last-minute military intervention to save him. It never came and he lost the Supreme Court case which obviously he could not win.

Then came his masterstroke: blaming the Americans for his downfall. Despite his firm belief that nobody knows the West better than him in Pakistan, Imran fails to realize that he is unpopular amongst those in the West; his ideas and style of governance are hardly something which would endear him to the Western school of thought. And if he thought that people in the Islamic world would come out in the thousands on the streets to protest his downfall he was again mistaken: even people in Pakistan failed to do so.

However, his blaming Donald Lu clicked with the people in Pakistan – although it made the Americans furious and turned him untrustworthy to the pro-American factors in Pakistan. For a few months, he portrayed himself a messiah who could stand up to the Americans and not take dictation from the West: he obviously had nothing to show in this respect except plain rhetoric and that he could speak English extempore and had an English wife and children. This obviously is not enough to stand to the Americans as you need to represent a strong country to do so – which he lacked.

But the people were unwilling to go into details and saw him as a leader who could stand up to the West. His association with anti-American credentials has clicked, although he has stopped talking about it now. He has achieved what he wanted to.

Then came the judiciary which he criticized. This proved to be an extremely easy target. As opposed to this, the media has proven to be more formidable to conquer and remains intensely anti-Imran despite Imran’s criticism, although it continues to give him immense coverage perhaps due to competitive demands. The most problematic are the ‘neutrals’. Due to the nature of the institution, it cannot respond to each allegation publicly. Imran’s strategy is to pressurize it to succumb to the pressure dreading a dissent. This is a novel strategy but extremely dangerous for the institution and can literally play havoc with the country. Imran can be taken to task but it is probably well realized that it would not be good for the country and the polity in the long run as proven by the Bhutto experience. It will also end up popularizing Imran Khan even more regardless of his fate.

At the moment, the thinking probably is to come up with a strategy to politically dent Imran’s popularity which has to be accomplished with an economy on the rebound. This is not on the horizon and everything is thus on hold. As a result, we all have a choice to listen to more of Imran’s lectures or switch to Netflix as an alternative. The choice is between sanity and insanity.

The writer is an advocate of the Supreme Court. He can be reached at: aj@jillani.org