Imran Khan Act II; plot thickens to purge PTI
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, May 17: Two days before Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan put out a short video, claiming that he would be again arrested, the US embassy in the Islamic nation had issued an advisory in which it cautioned of the impending disturbances.
Khan shared a video of the police personnel moving on to his residence in heavy deployment with full riot gears. He alleged that the plot has been hatched against him and his party over the attack on the core commander’s residence in Lahore, famously known as Jinnah House, to implicate the PTI in act of terrorism.
Leaked phone taps doing rounds claimed that the attack on the core commander’s residence was orchestrated at the highest level of the Pakistani Army. The subsequent purge of the army commanders in Lahore, claimed the leaked tapped phone conversation, added to the conspiracy theory that Khan was being implicated for his eventual elimination from Pakistani politics. Khan’s sympathizers within the Pakistani Army have also been purged in the aftermath of the May 9 attack in Lahore.
“The Pakistani people still do not have their right to choose own representatives. This is why Imran Khan is right to stand up to the military and ask for a free and fair election,” Waqas Larka, a journalist, told Al Jazeera.
Former diplomat Rajiv Dogra commented a day before that Khan is not giving up, as he is comparing the crackdown against his party workers to the actions of Chengez Khan’s terror. Raj Shukla, a strategic affairs commentator, noted that the police outside Khan’s residence is armed unlike previous occasions.
It clearly appears that the Pakistani military leadership has built the alibi to take out Khan from the political scene of Pakistan amid the Pakistani Supreme Court remaining defiant to the diktats of the Rawalpindi Corps. It may be recalled that the Pakistani military commanders had made failed bids to persuade the Supreme Court judges from setting deadlines for the provincial elections in Lahore and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
It was again Chief Justice of Pakistan Umar Ata Bandial who had given reprieve to Khan from arrest by the paramilitary personnel from the court premises. With the Pakistani military chief Asim Munir Ahmed struggling to make his writ run large in the Islamic country, Islamabad is faced with an urgency to take out Khan, who has been rabidly anti-America in his utterances, as Pakistan begs for the bailout package from International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as bend on the back to keep Beijing in good humour to get the loans pouring to keep the economy artificially alive.
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