Imran Khan’s new book is a sombre assessment of how his country landed in the mess it’s in.
Recently I got into an argument about Pakistan with the editor of a newspaper. The average Indian, insisted the editor, was interested in making money whereas the average Pakistani was interested in something entirely different, insinuating dark thoughts percolating in the heads of the aam admi on the other side of Wagah. When I pressed him for details, he snapped, “How do I know what they’re thinking? I haven’t been there, I don’t know any Pakistanis.”
My first thought was that some of my Memon friends in Pakistan who pride themselves on striking a good bargain would be most upset at hearing this. My next instinct was to try and hurl a copy of Ayesha Jalal’s dense but excellent revisionist biography of Jinnah, Sole Spokesman at him, or Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. But these are complex works with nuanced, sophisticated arguments. Instead, the perfect book for those who either need to or want to read a popular history of Pakistan has arrived — namely Imran Khan’s cogent, surprisingly erudite, often anguished and angry ode to his country and his people.
For those who long thought of Khan as a playboy, shaking his booty at London nightclubs and bedding many of the world’s winsome women, this book is a world removed from those days. Those eager to savour cricket gossip will be disappointed — there is none. Except, of course, for a warm-up game with the touring West Indian side armed with the world’s greatest pace attack. In a burst of inspiration, cricket fanatic Nawaz Sharif decides that who better to open the innings than him. He takes guard with a floppy white hat on, while Khan calls an ambulance. Sharif’s bat hardly moves as the first ball streaks by like a comet. The second shatters his stumps and everyone is very relieved.
The rest of the book, though, is a treatise on faith and foreign affairs, and a grim depiction of the terrible mess that Pakistan has got itself into. Khan describes the true origins of the wreckage of modern Pakistan when the urbane Zulfikar Bhutto made the country an Islamic republic in an effort to dilute his Westernised image by pandering to the Islamists. Zia continued the campaign in earnest while setting the bedrock for Islamic zealotry. This was followed by the money men and women — Benazir, who siphoned vast sums via her craven husband Asif Ali Zardari; Sharif, who was essentially handed state resources by Zia in order to counter the Pakistan People’s Party or PPP (paying Rs 5,000 in tax in one year); and finally Musharraf and Zardari, who after 9/11 repeatedly flogged the spectre of Islamic fanaticism so they could keep the spigot of US aid flowing into their pockets.
Faith is the cornerstone of Khan’s existence and his muse is the famous poet Iqbal whose philosophy of action, emphasis on freedom, justice and khudi, or “selfhood” Khan says is the prescription that Muslims need to unshackle themselves from the chains of feudalism and tyranny. Khan resisted religion for years. On a tour of New Zealand someone asked Khan why Islam was a violent religion. “So I started reading books about Islam and found that my mind was more stimulated than it had ever been,” he says.
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Khan makes the right noises, deriding the Taliban for their medieval Islam and craving a “new renaissance” in Pakistan, founded on Islamic principles and scientific progress. Yet he rails against the “westernised elite” going to clubs in skimpy clothing and living the life of hedonism that he thrived on when he was much younger, or TV programmes like Blind Date that he thinks offend Pakistani’s Muslim values where a woman is not allowed sexual freedom. Either this stance is a ruse or he is comfortably deluded, exoticising an ossified notion of “culture” in a globalising world. Also, a quick appraisal of the millions of gallons of illicit whisky consumed in Karachi and Lahore should give him a quick snapshot of what the masses really want.
The last section is his most powerful one. Instead of cajoling and persuading the Pushtun tribes to cooperate, Khan (a fellow Pushtun) says that CIA drone attacks — which succeed in eliminating only a small percentage of an already tiny fraction of terrorists — have killed thousands of civilians and are breeding oceans of hate. He quotes Anatol Lieven, professor in the war studies department of King’s College London, as calling the expansion of US Special Ops ground raids into the tribal areas as a “lunatic idea”. America’s “tactics are fuelling polarization, radicalization and chaos which could lead to exactly the kind of destabilization that it most fears. The weaker the Pakistani state gets, the less it will be able to control extremism,” he says. His solution? An immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan so peace is given a chance.
On India, Khan is curiously silent. While he glibly says that “activities of intelligence agencies should be curtailed” he neither offers any prescriptions on how he intends to do so, nor does he even mention the barbaric attacks on Indian citizens being orchestrated by those agencies. Khan needs to know that while there may be polarisation going on in Pakistan, with each attack in India planned by the ISI, the same thing is happening here. Addressing it would make him seem less suspicious to Indian audiences.
After almost exiting the World Cup, Pakistan fortuitously found itself in the finals in Melbourne, and two early wickets down. Khan promoted himself up the order and scored a gritty 72. After Wasim Akram demolished the English side, Khan took the last wicket and brought the Cup to Pakistan. Only later did people realise that he had torn a cartilage in his shoulder two days before the cup started and played the tournament thanks to daily cortisone injections. He says he couldn’t lift a glass of water for six months.
Today Khan, with a 62 per cent approval rating, is widely accepted as the only political hope for a country falling apart at the seams. He will have to pull off a triumph far greater than his last one in order to rescue his nation.
PAKISTAN
A Personal History Author: Imran Khan
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 400
Price: Rs 599