By: Shahid Islam 13 April 2022
The man behind removing Imran Khan from power is Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, the country’s chief of the army staffs.
Early this year, PM Khan fought a hard battle to extend the job tenure of Gen. Bajwa by convincing the treasury and the opposition members in the National Assembly (NA) to amend laws to extend the age of retirement for the services chiefs.
This had to be done due to the court negating an executive decision to extend the tenure of the incumbent army chief, Gen. Bajwa, who was slated to retire in late 2021.
On March 8, when the no-confidence motion got mooted in the NA, it had full backing of the army chief and the notorious ISI, the military intelligence outfit of the nation.
Bajwa even went beyond his protocol pieties to deplore in strong words the Russian military operations against Ukraine, something apt for the PM or the foreign minister of the country.
This coincided with the leaking on March 28 of the content of what’s now knows as the ‘threat letter’ that got conveyed to the Pakistan’s ambassador to the USA from the US’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu.
The threat from the US administration was brazen, condescending, and undiplomatic; warning of ‘dire consequences’ if the no-confidence motion against Imran Khan ‘not complied through.’
Khan disclosed the content of the letter to his cabinet, to the parliament, to the judiciary, and, upon advice from the National Security Council (NSC) about the hoovering of an existential threat to the country’s sovereignty, he advised the President on April 3 to dissolve the NA and call for a fresh election.
The move surprised his enemies, including Gen. Bajwa, who started playing his dirty game; keeping the Supreme Court open midnight and sending military to streets.
The Supreme Court moved suo motto to rescind the NA dissolution decision as illegal and ultra vires to the constitution, paving ways for Khan to be voted out of office on April 10 by a thin margin of 174 votes.
Sources say, as Khan decided to get the Supreme Court decision to reinstate the NA reviewed, citing the cruciality of the proven existence of a foreign scheme to change the incumbent political regime in Pakistan, army chief Gen. Bajwa visited the embattled PM twice in four hours, along with the ISI chief, and virtually whisked him away from the PM’s official residence by force.
In 1971, when then army chief, Gen. Yahya Khan, refused to handover power to the elected Awami League leader Sheikh Mujib, a constitutional crisis transformed into a war of liberation to truncate Pakistan by half, giving birth to an independent Bangladesh.
The decades following the 1970s witnessed more of the Bonapartist adventures in Pakistan, until Imran Khan emerged as a charismatic leader without the baggage or the stigma of filial politics that bedevils the leadership dynamism in all South Asian nations.
Imran Khan was elected democratically, behaved like a true democrat, proven to be honest and focused on ridding Pakistan from the blemishes of being an undemocratic nation. The army had torpedoed his mission by being party to yet another foreign conspiracy.
The future of Pakistan now hangs on the thread. The newly appointed interim PM, Shehbaz Sharif, awaits verdict on money laundering charges. He’s also known to be inflicted by other moral and material vices.
Was Imran Khan involved in acts constituting moral turpitude? Is he mentally or physically incapacitated? If not, why was he impeached?
If the courts of the country fail to recognize this reality and treat any allegation brought against Imran Khan in coming days as ‘intentionally aimed to disqualify him from the forthcoming election,’ Khan may not bounce back.
Yet, Pakistanis of all denominations can claim that they’d three plus years of ‘vibrant democracy’ under a charismatic leader named Imran Khan.
(Pic: Gen. Bajwa: branded as a traitor long before the history is written).