It would only be fair to say that Imran Khan be given a chance. He took a lot of flak even as the signs were gathering that his party would emerge the winner in the contentious Pakistan polls. He was pilloried for being the Pakistan Army’s choice as well as the likes of Hafiz Sayeed, the terror mastermind with an anti-India agenda the size of the K-2 mountain. If you would put yourself in Imran's place for a moment and consider whether you would not grab the opportunity to become Prime Minister, what would your answer be? Come on, you would grab it, wouldn’t you?
I got to know Imran well because I was also the ghost writer of at least a hundred of his columns, besides reporting matches in which he played or led Pakistan. I came to study him at close quarters as he called me for the columns, including in the middle of a Test match in Chepauk when the rest of the press box was left wondering what had happened that I was should be summoned to the dressing room even as the match was on. Imran was a thoughtful communicator of his ideas and his experiences in his columns and one who always insisted that I speak to him before writing, whatever be the circumstances involving the cricket.
Imran may have undergone several transformations as a career politician who, however, did not need to add to his estimated personal wealth of $55 million by the virtue of being in public life. His fierce anti-USA and anti-India stands were predictable enablers to his political career in a country riddled with great contradictions in a modern setting. The fact that none of 29 Pakistani Prime Ministers has ever completed a full term is symptomatic of the great unpredictability of living in Pakistan with mullahs on one side and the Pakistan Army on the other, besides myriad political, business, religious and diplomatic influences.
To have come through the rut to the top could have been no walk in the park. No, not like bowling out a diffident Indian batting lineup in the emotional cauldron of the small Sharjah Stadium with distinct national bias in the stands. At most times, Team India may have felt they were playing in Pakistan. And a dictatorial captain Imran enjoyed digging the knife in as the atmosphere seemed to demand it, much like that of the Christians in the lion’s den in Roman times. Not that Imran was always successful even in Sharjah but that he brought to the game certain attitude that carried early signs that one day he would end up on top of his nation.
Would the same trait of imperious singlehanded decision-making mark his regime as PM, which he is likely to be anytime soon after sorting out the required coalition to stitch up the numbers? There is every sign that the polls were rigged by an Army which may have predetermined the course of the election - how else do you explain a provincial assembly vote going one way and the national assembly vote going the other in a region like Punjab where Imran would have been least acceptable and where the Sharifs still hold sway? Putting a serving PM in jail to facilitate such a verdict is another sign of how events were manipulated.
Even so, Imran needs to be tested on what he does as PM and not how he became one. It remains to be seen if his innate sense of right and wrong, which was on display even at the height of India-Pak cricket tensions, will guide his actions or if he will descend to the level of a politician and compromise at every turn to sustain his rule. Let’s face it - Governing Pakistan is far more of a challenge than, say, running India. This is where Imran’s ability to be domineering in his relations with his countrymen could come in useful. He may be an Army proxy but if he has the depth of that military command he could do well enough.
Imran has ensured that relations with India will be fraught. He made that clear by broaching the Kashmir issue straightaway. He knows as well as anyone else in his country that there is going to be no abrupt change after 70 years and the territorial claim is laughable at this distance in time. Give the Kashmiris the option and they may like to go independent than join Pakistan, a country riven by more divisions than united by religion. Harping on the K-word is another predictable thing that Imran did to betray the political circumstances he is in.
We have to see him as a present-day politician headed to the Prime Minister’s chair than a representative of the gentleman's game or even as the former playboy who made no bones about being attractive and attracted to the opposite sex. He was the bronze Adonis once. But let’s just wait and see how he fares as the PM of Pakistan who won a loaded election to inherit a load more problems than ever before.
