Most time travel plots all have one scene in common, the one in which the protagonist picks up a newspaper in the future to discover that a previously inconceivable turn of events has actually come to pass, and everyone is behaving perfectly normal about it. I felt that way this week, when I saw pictures of Imran Khan sitting next to Donald Trump in the White House. It was as if someone had gone back to mess with the timeline of the Earth so that now we are all doomed to be ruled by celebrity bullies. (That Boris-why-doesn’t-he-own-a-comb Johnson is the new British PM is something I am still processing).
Like most of his life, Imran Khan’s first state visit to the U.S began with a carefully conceived photo op. In it you see Khan striding out of Qatar Airway business class holding a rosary and sense of fiscal responsibility. The stunt was meant to convey how wonderfully selfless it was for the PM to have traveled to the U.S on a commercial flight and not a private plane. Initial coverage in Pakistan focused on how this is the cheapest flight a PM has taken in decades and how Imran Khan is positively saint-like since he is bunking in an official residence rather than spending money on expensive hotels. His party claims the trip will only cost the taxpayer USD 60,000. They also made sure to release pictures of his entourage (including our foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi) waiting patiently for the PM in Washington DC’s airport buses, right next to older photos of the Sharifs landing on a private plane for comparison.
The thing is: I wouldn’t mind transparent publicity stunts like these if they were even slightly more effective – and I’m left wondering if I’m actually expected to believe any of the showmanship.
“You’re running a country, not an mid-range NGO that is trying to save on its yearly travel expenses, you hack!” I want to scream every time I come across another poorly conceived marketing ploy. It reeks of the time they tried to auction off cars in the Governor’s Mansion of Punjab, mere weeks before accepting an IMF bailout. Or when they thought it was possible to crowd-source a dam like one would a motorcycle. That none if it is real is obvious, but that they keep doing it makes me worry for their mental acuity and our mental health. Let’s be clear: the fact that the PM flew on Qatar Airways rather than his own plane doesn’t do much to make me feel more confident about the free-falling economy or the crippling economic debt my generation will have to pay back.
But PTI supporters, fueled by celebrity obsession and willful myopia, are lapping it up. Now it may well be impossible to get them to understand the brazen optics of this visit. But what I can do is point out just how alarming it is that the Foreign Minister said that it was good thing the military leadership was there, since that way you didn’t have people working at cross purposes. It does beg the (near obsolete) question: who is working for whom?
In all of this, I find so much in common between the characters of Imran Khan and Donald Trump.
Both have bullied their way to the top positions based on 1980s notoriety, populist rhetoric, a horrific level of self delusion and some strong extraterrestrial intervention. Both also frequently lie, as well as maintain they aren’t corrupt because they were wealthy before taking office (that Khan can boast a waistline in his sixties is a plus point that only comes out in comparison pictures). I imagine they both like each other, in the way that celebrities might when they meet at the local Emmy Awards or similar.
While hosting PM Imran Khan, US President Trump referred to his own troubled relationship with the media
I’ve begun to ignore what Trump says now (“let me know if I can help with all that” was his advice about the Kashmir dispute) so I was more interested in what Khan had to say at his rally for overseas Pakistanis in DC. By all accounts the turnout was massive, which is terrifying. Watch the video and you’ll see that the mass delusion that the current ruling dispensation in Pakistan projects to the world on a near constant basis is bought and consumed wholesale by the Pakistanis in America. The truth is they get to to believe in Naya Pakistan because they don’t have to live in it. They don’t have to worry about the rising prices, or highly unfavourable exchange rates, or crippling economic downsizing because they are safely ensconced in the suburbs in Maryland and DC with passports and dollar accounts. But these are also the most virulently participatory people in Khan’s vocal online support. It doesn’t matter to them that the opposition leaders are in custody, or that there won’t be a dam, or that we don’t have money. No, what matters to them is the exclusionary and frankly alarming rhetoric that they assume is a mark of strength rather than a compensation for cowardice.
But through it all, I was also noticing the more liberal-minded Pakistani students and academics that took pains to appear to protest the event with placards and signs in English. Seeing them reminded me that it is one here in the US that they can do this. It is only aboard that they feel confident (and safe) enough to challenge authority. None of them could have done it at a rally in Lahore or Rawalpindi, as Maryam Nawaz can attest.
At the end, despite my disenchantment and anger, I am left hoping that these men manage to do something despite their personalities. But as for their respective cults? I have a better chance to go back in time and become PM myself.
