Pakistan’s Imran Khan – playboy cricketer to PM? (Part 2)

And yet, Khan is no fundamentalist. The idealized Islamic state he says he would build in Pakistan would focus on justice, fairness and equality for all its citizens before the law. It would, above all, be "humane."

Khan often veers between shrewd political calculations — "as a political party, you can’t rule out alliances" — and what seems to be naive idealism.

His plan to raise revenue for Pakistan is to "inspire" people to pay their taxes through his personal example and somehow rooting out all corruption, boosting the country’s pitiful tax-to-GDP ratio of about 10 percent, one of the lowest in the world.

Some of the parties he has associated himself with in the past are notably lacking in democratic and liberal bona fides, such as the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami, which has cheered the murder of blasphemers and campaigned against laws that would grant women
and religious minorities equal status to Muslims.

POLL?

But how might Khan do in the election? Given the current flux in Pakistani politics, few analysts would hazard a guess. Many think he could split the right-leaning, nationalist vote currently dominated by the former Prime Minister Nawaz Shari’s Pakistan
Muslim League and keep Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party in power.

"He seems to have inspired more people to join the political process," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress in Washington. "But to date, his political organisation has seemed weak and not well managed, particularly in contrast
to his charity."

Khan himself believes his time has come.

"I have this very clear vision, as I say in the book," he said. "This has been a 15-year struggle which no one has conducted in Pakistan before. And now I feel I’m closer to my destiny."

But all that’s really clear right now is that Khan reflects the yearnings of a deeply disillusioned and frustrated country that has seen 63 years of military and civilian governments repeatedly fail it — all in the service of a national ideology looking
for a nation.

It is this ideology — a home for South Asia’s Muslims and a shining beacon of Islamic democracy — voiced by Allama Iqbal, considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan and the man who coined the name of the country, that motivates Khan.

"He says your vision or your destiny for your dream, it should be so great, it should be so noble and selfless that rather than you asking God that God grant you this destiny, that God would be so impressed by your dream, that he asks you: What do you want?"

He paused to consider this. "In other words, our destiny is in our hands. We have to dream; the bigger the dream, the bigger the man."

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=4091

Posted by Awais Khan on Nov 19 2011. Filed under Editorial, Education, Opinion, Pakistan, Politics, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry