Imran Khan’s Provocative Statements: There’s A Method To His Madness

Ever since the creation of Pakistan, a long line of religious ideologues have justified their unpalatable political messages through emotional messaging. Occasionally, some of them did come up with new ideas but whenever their ideas were met with intellectual challenges they have always resorted to the tactics of exciting the passion and emotions of the masses in response.

This has led to the creation of a political and intellectual environment where facts, ideas and analyses are forced to take a back seat. Facts and ideas become the least important commodities when deciding a political argument in such an atmosphere. This situation, however, has not remained restricted to the realm of religious contestation. We are living in a political cultural milieu that is shaped by political campaigns based on the technique of exciting people’s emotions and passions. Political leaders resort to this technique more frequently than they normally invoke facts, ideas or analyses. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan is one such political leader whose political campaigns are mostly based on inciting emotions and passions among the masses. And yet he has the audacity to project his political campaigns to be based on fresh ideas.

I have picked two of Imran Khan’s recent slogans or themes in his political campaign to illustrate the above mentioned point. Firstly, I will briefly discuss his slogan of establishing a so-called Medina style welfare state in Pakistan and then I will move on to his recent slogan of transforming Pakistan’s foreign policy into an independent foreign policy.

At no point of time has Imran Khan presented a concrete concept of either Medina style welfare state or independent foreign policy. In both the cases Imran Khan’s strategy is aimed at provoking a passionate and emotional response from his conservative middle class constituency, without ever explaining what exactly he means by Medina style welfare state or independent foreign policy. However, it is clear that Imran Khan is having a field day in raising both these slogans as there doesn’t seem to exist any potent political voice that can critique his vague slogans based campaign.

What exactly does he mean by the Medina style welfare state?

Both modern state and welfare state are western political concepts that hardly have anything to do with Islamic political thought as it has come down to us from antiquity. The political community that was established by the prophet of Allah (PBUH) in Medina cannot be described as a state in the modern bureaucratic and territorial sense as we understand the concept in modern times.

Welfare state is a modern western concept and modern welfare states emerged in the west only at the conclusion of the Second World War as a result of economic revival in Western and northern Europe. Post –Second World War period is often described as the Golden period of economic growth, prosperity and affluence in western European societies. This economic growth created enough fiscal space for western European governments to initiate welfare programs for the downtrodden of their societies.

This post-war period of economic affluence came to an end with the financial crisis of 2008 and with it came the idea of a welfare state in the west. The idea of a welfare state has since come under scathing criticism from across the political spectrum in western societies. This criticism is mostly based on the fact that welfare states have led to unaffordable expansion of state machinery and has thus led to ballooning of state expenditures in the form of subsidies to the people. In cash strapped economy like Pakistan anyone making welfare state as main plank of his political campaign should treated as worst type of opportunist who is out to instigate people’s emotions with reference to a city (Medina) that has strong emotional value for Muslim society like Pakistan.

What does he mean by Independent Foreign Policy?

The aspiration for Independent foreign policy is a relic from the Cold War era—when Pakistani foreign policy was tilted toward Washington and when for a brief period Pakistan had to balance between its relations with Beijing and its strategic alliance with Washington. This was the period of big power rivalries and elder Bhutto came up with the idea of independent foreign policy to obtain the best possible deals from all the power centers in world politics. That era has long come to an end. We are living in an interdependent world, where absolute sovereignty is considered an outdated concept, especially for a country like Pakistan.

A country which has vaccinated 70 percent of its population with vaccination shots received as donations has no right to talk about independent foreign policy.

This is because we are too dependent on major capitals of the world for our mere survival. Imran Khan has spent almost four years in office and he should have realised that all Pakistan state has done in its more than 70 years existence is to survive and survive by depending on major powers.

A country which has vaccinated 70 percent of its population with vaccination shots received as donations has no right to talk about independent foreign policy. In the next ten years the most dreadful threat Pakistan state would be facing will be related to climate change. Forget about India and even forget about internal threats. Climate changes could derail Pakistan state. Let there be no doubt about it. We will be heavily dependent on foreign powers for our survival. In such a situation, independent foreign policy will be nothing more than cheap sloganeering and emotionalism.

Imran Khan is provoking the emotions and passions of Pakistani people because he is not facing a political and intellectual resistance from any popular political force that could challenge his resort to technique of provoking emotions. I think the single biggest misfortunate of the Pakistani people is the absence of any secular-liberal left political party that can challenge Imran Khan’s pseudo-religiosity at the grass root level and which can tell the people that Imran Khan is leading them towards a dark alley with the other end closed.

The narrative of Khan’s main rival, PML-N, is particularly based on pseudo religiosity that it can hardly unpack his technique for the public.