Guest Author:Justice Markandey Katju (Retd.)
While the nation mourns one man’s confinement, it forgets the poverty, inflation and broken promises he left behind for millions.
I am a well wisher of the people of Pakistan, and would like them to have good lives. But it is precisely for that reason that I have written this article, as I believe they are behaving in an immature manner.
These days Pakistanis are raising a big hue and cry and uproar over the plight of Imran Khan.
I too am sorry for the ill treatment being meted out to him by the Pakistan Establishment. Not only has he been in jail for 3 years ( convicted on largely trumped up and concocted charges ), he has also been kept in solitary confinement for long periods with no books, newspapers, TV etc, and no contact with relatives, friends, lawyers, etc, which is inhuman.
However, it is necessary to go deeper into the matter.
The test of every political activity is one, and only one : does it raise the standard of living of the people ? Does it give them better lives ?
Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan from 2018 to 2022. Was the massive poverty, massive unemployment, skyrocketing prices of food and other essential commodities, appalling level of child malnutrition, and other great socio-economic evils in Pakistan even slightly reduced during this period ? No, not even a dent was created.
Most of the time when he was the Prime Minister Imran Khan spent it in prosecuting and jailing his political opponents, uttering reactionary homilies like Madine ke Riyasat, and taking loans from IMF ( though he had earlier announced that he would rather die than take them ), thus making Pakistan more debt ridden than ever before.
His slogan had been to get rid of corruption in Pakistan and ensure honesty in public life.
But he forgot all that in the 2018 parliamentary elections. To satisfy his ambition, he abandoned his principles and gave PTI tickets to numerous corrupt ‘electables’, and hobnobbed with thoroughly reactionary clerics, to ensure his party’s electoral success, and took the army’s help to secure a majority in Parliament.
He pretended to be modern minded, but after becoming the PM among the first things he did was to remove Atif Mian, the internationally renowned economist, from the Pakistan Economic Advisory Council just because he was an Ahmadi ( to placate and ingratiate himself with the reactionaries in Pakistan ). He made laughable statements like saying that the rise in rapes in Pakistan was because Pakistani women wore few clothes.
Inflation increased in Pakistan during his tenure as PM, and though he inherited a weak economy, he left it far worse.
All this has been forgotten by the Pakistanis, who seem to be largely short sighted and emotional rather than rational, and all they see is the present ill treatment of Imran Khan.
What they forget is that even if he is released and again becomes the PM, his record of the period when he was in office shows that he will only repeat his inane dramatics and performance during that period.
So Pakistanis should stop their silly lament over the fate of Imran Khan, a man who only has ambition and nothing else in his head. The concern of Pakistanis should be how to alleviate the sufferings of the 25 crore people of Pakistan, rather than the suffering of one man
About the Author :Justice Markandey Katju is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India and former Chairman of the Press Council of India, known for his outspoken views on social, political, and legal issues. He writes and speaks extensively on justice, secularism, and the socio-economic transformation of India.
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