by MADIHA R. TAHIR
Imran has pressed on with his model of politics, a brand that draws connections between the religious and the political. Indeed, that is how he explains his entrée into politics. “You have to ask two questions if you’re a thinking person,” he said. “Some people blissfully never ask themselves these questions: What is the purpose of existence? What will happen to us when we die? These two questions, and only religion can answer. No science can answer that question.” Imran’s answer to the first question provides his rationale for having entered politics. “The purpose of existence is so simple,” he said, with the tone of his voice rising as if to stress that this was self-evident. “The more the Almighty gives us, the more responsibility on us what we need to do for others. That’s it. No rocket science. It’s being a good human being,” he continued, and then moved to a more openly political interpretation of the question. “In our society, people like us, who have an option of not doing anything—do we sit on our backside and watch our country go down the drain or do we stand up to this corrupt mafia who, in the name of politics and democracy, are plundering the country. Is anyone going to stand up to them or not?”
But this is ultimately a moral issue—who will stand up to the bad guys?—rather than a political one: in a similar vein, Khan typically argues that the problem in Pakistani politics today has to do with the personal ethical failures of politicians rather than the system that encourages, nourishes, buttresses and supports them, or the forms of capitalism that reproduce that system. Breaking down that system will require land reform, wealth redistribution and other wholesale structural changes about which Imran speaks little, if at all. It is Imran’s displacement of political questions onto a moral framework—and not merely his resistance to political favour-trading, as some have claimed—which turns his political vision into a kind of “anti-politics”.
Imran’s moral orientation can yield trenchant critiques of sociopolitical issues, but it also walks him into a narrow politics that is often questionable in its particulars. Take, for example, his reply to my question about the Hudood Ordinance—a set of draconian laws enacted by Zia ul-Haq that enforce severe punishments for extramarital sex, including rape: “Had it been debated properly by a proper Parliament rather than a dictator, using Islam, had that not been done, this would’ve been a well-framed law, but as it happened, this was not debated.”
And this is what he said when I asked him about the so-called “blasphemy law”, whose abuses had been widely chronicled even before Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was murdered for opposing it: “Blasphemy is the same thing. You see blasphemy, as I told you, was a British-made law, and it was to create harmony in the society.” Pakistan’s current law bears little resemblance to that intention, but Imran continued. “So what you’ve seen in Pakistan is a breakdown of rule of law. There is no law in Pakistan!”
I pressed him, asking whether he really thought the problem was simply the way the laws were applied, rather than the laws themselves. “If you did not have a blasphemy law in Pakistan,” he said, “you will have bloodshed in villages and communities because when someone will say someone has said this about the Prophet, and then you will see fanatics going and killing people.” But that’s happening right now, I insisted. “No,” he countered. “What happens now is that they hand them over to the law. At least these people then have a law to protect them. You would have lynching crowds otherwise.”
The Caravan for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)