Why Khan is dangerous

In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates talks about the allegory of the cave in his dialogue with Glaucon.

The allegory imagines a group of prisoners chained together inside an underground cave, staring at a wall. Behind them, on a raised platform, there is a fire. Between the prisoners and the fire, there’s another wall, with puppeteers walking along it with different objects. The light from the fire reflects the shadows of those objects on the wall in front of the prisoners who cannot turn back or sideways.

The allegory is symbolic of many aspects of life and truth, contrasting reality with our perception or interpretation of it. But it also depicts a comfort zone. The prisoners, used to nothing else but the shadows, consider them as the real objects. Anything that yanks them out of that zone will, like the light, blind a prisoner who could turn back.

As this country plunges further into partisan darkness with former Prime Minister Imran Khan galvanising his support base through fiery speeches and threats that are clearly aimed at undermining institutions, it is instructive to make sense of what’s happening.

Let’s begin with Khan’s narrative, a tale swallowed hook, line and sinker by his followers, young and not-so-young alike.

This country has been ruled for decades by corrupt dynasts. They have stashed their wealth abroad, which has made this country poor. The Establishment has conspired with the political brigands to oust Khan, the legitimate leader of this country. Khan is the only leader with the courage to stand up for principles, is pure as driven snow, and a patriot who can be the bulwark against external challenges. The conspiracy was hatched by a foreign power and the local sell-outs colluded with that power to oust Khan.

Hence the social media hashtag: #importedgovernment

Anyone who has the fortune or misfortune of being on WhatsApp knows the number of slanted messages that arrive in one’s inbox with daily frequency. For example, Gen Michael Kurilla, US CENTCOM commander, visited Pakistan on August 18 with a delegation and met the COAS and his team. One message asks, “What new orders have been received by Pakistan now?” The message then goes back into history, starting with Ayub Khan and narrates how Pakistan has done the US bidding when the country was ruled by military generals.

Another earlier message created a nexus between General Qamar Bajwa’s call to US Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, and the targeting of Ayman al-Zawahiri, asking what secret deals have been made since Khan was ousted from power? Other such messages present Khan as the leader who was unbending and stood up to the US. These messages are cleverly crafted to support the PTI narrative, oft using facts from the country’s history.

For instance, the army’s overt and covert interventions into politics are a fact; the judiciary’s acts of omission and commission are a fact; poor governance and political wrangling of the eighties and nineties are facts. But the narrative weaves a tapestry using these facts selectively to offer Khan as the only alternative. The story also presents Khan as someone who has never compromised and has struggled against the corrupt Sharifs and Zardari for 26 years.

Much of this is poppycock, of course. But Khan’s supporters don’t like any ‘other’ facts besides their own. To take events of just the past three years, how did Khan manage to form the government in 2018, a government that gave rise to the terms ‘selected’ and ‘hybrid’? How did he link up with the PPP in March 2018 to defeat PMLN’s candidate for chairman Senate? What about the earlier wheeling-dealing in the Balochistan assembly? Why does he have many dynasts in his own party? What about people who are known to be ‘corrupt’? Why did he need to link up with the Chaudhrys who are a political family and widely known to be without much scruples? One can go on citing examples and presenting contrasting evidence from Khan’s old statements, his statements when he was the PM and his statements since he lost his job.

None of those facts matter to Khan’s supporters. If one does press the point, their response is that he himself is clean. But what is the difference between a man who himself is corrupt and one who willingly colludes with people known to be corrupt? Logically, either Khan is a party to the corruption of his associates or he is ignorant. Even if one suspends disbelief and assumes that Khan would never approve of corruption, that means he is either a hypocrite or horrendously incompetent in supervising his subordinates. And yet his supporters are unmoved. To the non-partisan that looks like the comfort zone of willing prisoners in Socrates’ imagined cave. Or, less charitably, the deliberate turning of blind eye to facts that do not fit in with the PTI narrative.

I have already written about Khan’s insidious undermining of military discipline so I shan’t belabour that point. But he has done the same with the police, threatening the IG Islamabad. He has also threatened a judge for which he is now in the legal wringer. Despite winning the by-elections in the Punjab, Khan has continued to fulminate against the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and the Chief Election Commissioner. He and his supporters have done the same to judges with his supporters attacking justices on social media and naming names.

At this stage, Khan’s inordinate ambition poses a threat to this country. Like all other politicians, Khan wants to return to power. That’s not a problem per se. However, unlike other politicians, Khan has clothed himself in moral robes and adopted a worldview that brooks no doubt, no uncertainty. He is a man who expresses self-righteous indignation towards everyone outside of himself and manages to do so consistently through self-righteous complacency.

And he has produced similar clones possibly and scarily in the millions. Under normal circumstances, people can vote in and vote out parties. Except for the card-carrying members of political parties, others vote on the basis of performance or interests. They are not sans culottes looking to storm the Bastille nor are they looking for an incorruptible Robespierre because they learnt in high school that disruptions do not generally produce intended results.

Equally, many of them know that democracy as a concept was much debated in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. James Madison, one of the Federalist writers and the 4th President of the United States, was wary of rule by the people. Which is why we find this debate among the Federalist writers about the distinction between democracy in an Athenian sense and representative democracy in a republic.

This is also why the idea of democracy has evolved to become not just about demos and a political system of rule by the people, but also more importantly, a system of rights. In other words, it’s not just about the majority. A majority which is unhindered by a sense of rights — not just enshrined in constitutional guarantees but also through normative acceptance of those values — is not democracy but majoritarian authoritarianism.

The idea is simple: majorities cannot abridge the fundamental rights of citizens. Hence, protections like the bill of rights; constitutional guarantees; in some cases, like the US, separation of powers; devolution of power to local governments and much more.

Plato argued that political regimes follow an evolutionary trajectory, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Oligarchies concede space to democracies (in the Athenian sense) when the elites fail. But then democracies — in the sense of being mobocracies — give way to tyrannies with the passion of mobs overwhelming political sagacity. But the tyrant comes to power as a peoples’ leader. As author Sean Illing wrote, “He’s the ultimate simplifier, the one man who can make everything whole again.”

Does that sound familiar?

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies