- Why is the party scared of the book?
The PTI leadership suffers from a deep rooted, almost pathological, sense of insecurity. This is the conclusion one is forced to draw from the party leadership’s totally inappropriate brouhaha over Reham Khan’s yet to be published autobiography. The book is being characterised as obscene, calumnious, a pack of lies, damaging to the family values and part of an exercise in pre-poll rigging, all at the same time. Demands are being made to urgently ban the book.
One fails to understand why the party leadership did not wait for the book to be published before starting an all-out campaign against it. If the book was to turn out to be as bad as we are being led to believe, most of the readers would consign it into the dust bin. Nobody would then find fault with the PTI if it launched libel proceedings against the author in the court. Imran Khan however is a political leader. The people of Pakistan have a right to know what Khan’s former wife who had the opportunity to view him closely has to say about him irrespective of whether it is positive or negative. No one has a right to block the information from public.
The episode raises worrying questions about the PTI’s democratic credentials. To call for banning a book before it is in the market reveals an autocratic, if not fascistic, mindset. In democracies books about the lives of national leaders frequently refer to the mistakes and even blunders committed by them. Some shed light on their private affairs, even sexual proclivities. These continue to be sold in book shops. Will writers have to submit the manuscripts of their books on Imran Khan’s life to a board of censorship under a PTI government before sending it to the publishers or to the printing press?
The uproar created by the PTI leadership has in fact been counterproductive. Thanks to Hamza Abbasi and Fawad Chaudhry, the book has already got extraordinary publicity generating sufficient curiosity among the general public which is bound to make it a best seller the moment it is published.
