'I had a dream': But this vision has been dented in Imran Khan's 'Naya Pakistan'
It's too painful to think about.
'I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.'
— Martin Luther King (1963)
I did not vote for Prime Minister Imran Khan's 'Naya Pakistan'. This was not by design. I would have liked to vote, but like many Pakistanis, I have grown weary of the constant political circus that is Pakistani politics with civilian governments being ushered in and out of power, without any discernible change in the country's direction.
If I had been in Pakistan, I would still have voted though. I did last time, in 2013 when, despite being skeptical about Mr Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI) party, I cast a vote for it. They won in my constituency of Lahore but lost the province of Punjab. They did manage to form a government in the restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province where they have been in power for the last five years.
The news from KP about their government's tenure, at least what I read, has been mixed. There were reports of improvements in health, the police service and other administrative matters. Khan also managed to open a campus of his widely heralded Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital (named after his late mother) in Peshawar, KP's largest city, and he announced another one in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi.
On other matters, there was decidedly less progress.
Photos circulating in the news and social media showed that infrastructure was still a mess and a much vaunted city-wide bus service project appeared bogged down in red tape.
At any rate, by the time I came back to Lahore, the election was over and it appeared that the PTI had at last gained enough seats to patch together a coalition. A few days later, Khan was elected Prime Minister with a comfortable majority. A few days after that came his first nationally televised speech which, although long on rhetoric and short on policy, did contain some points that were music to the ears of liberal leftists like myself.
In a folksy, homely style, Khan talked passionately about child malnutrition, Pakistan's water and climate crisis, our perpetual energy woes and, most importantly, our wounded economy which was hemorrhaging foreign exchange at an alarming rate - Pakistan's currency has declined by about 15% in the months before the election.
While we had watched Khan's wooing of militant Islamists in the run-up to the election with alarm, we all felt slightly reassured after the speech. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all. And the best thing about Khan's ascendance to power was that he had, finally, given Pakistanis the much longed-for 'third option' in politics. We no longer had to hold our noses and vote either for Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) or the even more discredited Pakistan People's Party (PPP).
Immediately after the speech though, the new government appeared to stumble badly.
There was a series of missteps, some probably inadvertent that appeared to show an administration completely unprepared to run a country. There was an embarrassing incident involving a call between American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Khan, then another one — which bordered on the absurd — about Khan and the French president.
There was a silly matter about Khan travelling by helicopter from his residence to Parliament and also the matter of Khan appointing a complete political non-entity to the post of Chief Minister of Pakistan's most populous Punjab province. All this though appeared to be the expected teething problems of a team unused to handling national political matters.
The most recent issue however has raised serious concerns about where Mr Khan's government is heading — it started quietly enough. No one had even heard of a gentleman by the name of Atif Mian until this happened although Khan apparently had.
The video in which Imran Khan can be seen pitching for Atif Mian in 2014.
He is on video taunting Nawaz Sharif at his 'dharna' in 2014 that unlike him (Sharif), he would not appoint his 'samdhi' ('in-law') to be finance minister (Sharif had appointed Ishaq Dar, whose son is married to Sharif's daughter). Khan further boasted that he would invite Atif Mian, "a professor at Princeton and one of the 25 top economists in the world", to be his finance minister.
It now appears that even back then, a group of Islamists had approached Khan after his speech to inform him that Mian, brilliant economist though he was, belonged to the 'Ahmaddiya' sect (the Ahmadiyya claim that they are a sect of Islam, like the Shia. Militant Islamists vehemently reject this assertion, terming them 'kafirs', based primarily on their interpretation of the concept of 'Khatm-e Nabuwwat' — finality of Prophethood).
Ahmadis (sometimes referred to in a derogatory fashion as 'Qadianis' from 'Qadian', a town in district Gurdaspur, where the founder of the faith, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, was born) were declared 'Non-Muslims' by Pakistan's Parliament in 1973 when then-Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto buckled under the pressure of religious extremists.
Ever since, discrimination against the Ahmadiyya is enshrined in Pakistan's Constitution with both passive suppression (not allowing them to pray in public — or even call their prayer places 'mosques') as well as active oppression against them (in the form of regular beatings, killings and property seizures). Every Pakistani, when they go to have a national ID card or passport made, has to sign an oath declaring themselves not Ahmadis and explicitly disavowing any association with them. Tens of thousands of Ahmadiyyas have left Pakistan and settled abroad and those that remain keep very low profiles to stay out of trouble.
Interestingly, the only Nobel laureate in Pakistan's history (Professor Abdus Salam, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979) belongs to this community.
Imran Khan's government recently announced that Mr Mian would serve on the government's Economic Advisory Council (EAC) — welcome news for a country which is an economic basket case. Almost immediately, a whispering campaign started against Mian on media and social media. To Khan's initial credit, his information minister and chief spokesman Fawad Chaudhry came forward and stridently denounced the critics, asking rhetorically 'Are Pakistan's minorities not citizens of this country?'; the exact same thing leftists and liberals have been saying for years about the country's much persecuted minorities — these include not just the Ahmadiyya but also Shias, Hazaras, Hindus, Christians and many others.
While we all celebrated on social media, some voices, older or maybe just more pessimistic, advised caution.
Sure enough, just three days later, Khan's government announced that it had removed Mian from the EAC (later changing its statement to say he had resigned). Mian himself remained the picture of grace throughout this saga, tweeting, "My prayers will always be with Pakistan and I will always be ready to help it in any way that is required."
1/ For the sake of the stability of the Government of Pakistan, I have resigned from the Economic Advisory Council, as the Government was facing a lot of adverse pressure regarding my appointment from the Mullahs (Muslim clerics) and their supporters.
— Atif Mian (@AtifRMian) September 7, 2018
2/ Nevertheless, I will always be ready to serve Pakistan as it is the country in which I was raised and which I love a great deal. Serving my country is an inherent part of my faith and will always be my heartfelt desire.
— Atif Mian (@AtifRMian) September 7, 2018
3/ Moving forward, I now hope and pray that the Economic Advisory Council is able to fulfill its mandate in the very best way so that the Pakistani people and nation can prosper and flourish.
— Atif Mian (@AtifRMian) September 7, 2018
4/ My prayers will always be with Pakistan and I will always be ready to help it in any way that is required.
— Atif Mian (@AtifRMian) September 7, 2018
But Khan's spokesman then appeared to debase himself further by tweeting in support of his and his party leadership's religious credentials and eulogising those he had criticised as 'extremists' just three days before as 'Ulema' ('religious scholars').
The Islamists, of course, had a field day crowing on social media that they had forced the new government to capitulate. To make matters worse, in the days to follow, two more eminent economists publicly announced their dissociation from the EAC in solidarity with Mian and more are expected to follow. In addition, several prominent international economists spoke out in favour of Mr Mian and against the actions of Khan's government.
Imran Khan himself remained suspiciously silent throughout the furore — when he finally appeared on TV the day after Mian was removed from the EAC, it was not to address this matter but to make a faintly ridiculous appeal to expatriate Pakistanis to donate $1000 each to his government's 'Dam building fund'.
The contrast could not be more stark — a government that fires a world-class economist from its top team, loses a few more in the process, then proceeds to ask donors to send money to solve its economic woes.
So, once again, people like me who had dared to hope against hope for Imran Khan to begin the process of rolling back Pakistan's inexorable slide towards religious extremism and get the economy back on track are left to rue the moment. A government that never tires of shouting about 'merit' and 'qualifications' from the rooftops, and then rejects an eminently qualified professional on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, seems ill-equipped to handle the myriad problems facing the nation.
And if Khan and his government can't be bothered to take a stand when they have a comfortable majority in Parliament and a political opposition in total disarray, what will happen when things get tough?
It's too painful to think about.
Suffice to say that the day when Pakistan will value its sons and daughters on the 'content of their character' seems farther away than ever.