On the day a court in Pakistan finally pronounced its verdict in one of the more credible cases against Imran Khan, The New York Times published a report from its Islamabad correspondent Salman Masood about the “messianic certainty” among the former prime minister’s supporters in the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) that the incoming US president will somehow liberate their leader.
The sporadic successes of the lobbying efforts by Khan devotees among the diaspora in America, reflected in the Pakistani-American Public Affairs Committee (PAKPAC USA, modelled on the infinitely more formidable Zionist model, AIPAC), included Richard Grenell, named by Donald Trump as his “envoy for special missions”.
“Watch Pakistan. Their Trump-like leader is in prison on phony charges, and the people there have been inspired by the US Red Wave,” Grenell tweeted. This particular X post was deleted shortly afterwards, possibly at the behest of his Pakistani backers who realise that Khan bristles at credible comparisons to Trump as a right-wing populist with more brawn than brain.
The 14-year sentence awarded to Khan last week – alongside seven years for his wife, the barely visible spiritualist Bushra Bibi – stretches back to his 2018-22 tenure as a military-backed prime minister. In 2019, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) found that a substantial sum of money, suspected to have been “derived from bribery and corruption in a foreign country”, deserved to be repatriated to Pakistan. It had been traced to Pakistan’s largest property tycoon, Malik Riaz Hussain – who faced charges and a huge fine in his homeland for illegally acquiring vast tracts of land on the outskirts of Karachi to expand his shady housing projects.
Some of the British bank accounts associated with him and his family had been frozen as the NCA investigation progressed, and a sumptuous London property at the prestigious address of 1 Hyde Park Place had been seized. Following a civil agreement with Riaz, the UK agreed to send the £290 million to Pakistan. Khan’s special assistant on accountability, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, brought a proposal to the PTI cabinet that he insisted had to be blindly approved because of a non-disclosure agreement with the NCA.
There was minimal resistance among the cabinet to what turned out be a deal whereby the funds from the UK would go into a Pakistani Supreme Court account as part payment for Riaz’s legal debt. “The most obvious question that arose,” according to an editorial on Saturday in the Karachi daily Dawn, “was how could money seized from an individual on suspicion that it was dirty be used to benefit that same individual in a different case”.
The quid pro quo, according to the Khan indictment, was that Riaz funded the then PM’s al-Qadir Trust, which in turn established a putative university in the Punjab hinterland. The physically lavish institution, ostensibly dedicated to educating the poor, offers only two subjects: management sciences and Islamic studies. It has enrolled no more than 200 students over the past four years, and has not been recognised as a university by the provincial authorities.
Interestingly the 1 Hyde Park Place property was acquired by Riaz in 2016 from Hassan Sharif, son of the then PM, Nawaz Sharif (and nephew of the incumbent, Shehbaz Sharif). This was around the time when the Sharif family’s offshore holdings had been cited in the Panama Papers.
His spokespeople suggest Khan is mortified at the idea of al-Qadir falling into the hands of the Sharif clan, primarily Hassan’s sister Maryam, who was imprisoned during the PTI’s stint in power and remains the subject of frequent misogynistic taunts from Khan acolytes. Her administrative acumen and competence should obviously be open to question, alongside her family’s political roots as an outgrowth of military dictatorship and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s current role as a civilian proxy for the all-powerful armed forces. However, it is thoroughly hypocritical of the PTI to level any criticism against an entity that effectively prefigured Khan’s elevation to the helm of affairs – and, on occasion, his downfall.
Khan was sentenced last Friday to 14 years in prison, while his wife, Bushra Bibi, received a seven-year sentence, arguably reflecting the derogation of women to half the status of males. Some of the others implicated in the fraud, including Riaz and Akbar, have been declared “proclaimed offenders”. They are apparently not in the country; for Pakistan’s economic and political elites, Dubai and/or London are generally a home away from home.
The sentencing won’t disrupt ongoing negotiations between the PTI and the Sharif-led coalition government in Islamabad, even though they appear to have been less than fruitful so far. For a long time, the PTI disdained the idea of talks with the politicians currently in favour, insisting on army generals as interlocutors. That is not entirely illogical, given the nation’s tendency towards military supremacy. But it’s also not particularly logical for a political force that claims to favour a shift in the status quo.
A couple of decades ago, Pakistan’s largest political parties – the Sharifs’ PML-N and the Pakistan People’s Party then led by Benazir Bhutto – signed a Charter of Democracy partially aimed, at least on paper, at reducing the military’s role in politics. Not much came of it eventually, as Bhutto was assassinated (like her father, although by different means) and the generals pushed back against autonomy for political forces – not least by relentlessly promoting Imran Khan as a populist alternative. It paid off only to a certain extent: despite electoral manipulation, Khan required military assistance to form a government in 2018, and proceeded to head an administration whose chief surviving legacy is an obscurantist national curriculum for schools.
He shouldn’t have been surprised when the same tools were used against him from 2022 onwards, culminating in last year’s dodgy election.
Verging in many ways on a failed state, Pakistan is renowned for the relentless supremacy of its three A’s: Allah, Army and America. From the incarcerated Khan’s vantage point, a plaintive “why hast thou forsaken me?” could be directed at the first two. It remains to be seen, meanwhile, whether Trump will show any interest in resurrecting a fellow self-ordained messiah.
Mahir Ali
Mahir Ali has worked as a journalist in Pakistan, the UAE and Australia across four decades.