- Imran and his principles
Imran Khan is fast turning out to be the typical one-step-forward-two-steps-back poster child of Pakistani politics. For one who never tires of extolling the virtues of parliamentary democracy as practiced in the west – especially the politicians’ subservience to the system — there seems, of late especially, more than the usual daylight between his words and actions. The matter of removing Zulfi Bukhari’s name from the Exit Control List (ECL) for example, where he worked his telephone like one of the more conventional politicians he constantly accuses of corruption, will stick out like a sore thumb for a while.
It turns out that the caretaker interior minister is also a board member at the Imran Khan Foundation (IKF). Granted, nothing wrong with a minister in the caretaker setup to have humanitarian – or even political – motives as long as they don’t interfere with a very temporary job assignment. But if Khan really did call the said minister, and he subsequently set the ball rolling that revoked the no-fly clause in Bukhari’s inquiry, then Imran has some serious questions to answer. For one, if he can undo NAB and interior ministry rules with one phone call when he does not hold any public office, what can be expected of him should he really become PM?
Then there’s also the matter of the chartered plane that shuttled him across the Arabian Ocean to walk barefooted in the holy land (on instructions of his latest wife, according to the press). Yet news reports also mention, quoting Imran’s spokesman Fawad Chaudhry, that the Rs10 million – the cost of chartering the private plane – bill is being funded by ‘private donors’ not party members, without elaborating any further. Why does a man claiming to represent the common man need to charter a special plane to fly to KSA on someone else’s money? This, after the beeline of all sorts of politicians into PTI to build momentum for the election, seems to expose Imran as pretty much like the people he derides in his public speeches; or so an increasing number of his party members seem to think.
