WHAT I admire most in Imran Khan is his ability to straddle irreconcilables. He is fond of giving the example of countries like England and Germany, and seems impressed by their institutions. Yet he does not like what he calls ‘Western values’ — as if institutions of a society can be separated from its values!

I would request Imran to read up on Pakistan’s political and legal history beyond school textbooks, if nothing else, a book authored by a leader from his own ranks; Hamid Khan’s Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan.

Imran’s recent comments on Nawaz’s conviction calling it a ‘first-ever’, ‘a new leaf’ in Pakistan’s history, when a powerful person stands convicted, made the rounds in the mainstream as well as social media. But is this correct? Is this the first time when an elected politician is first ousted and then sentenced on ‘corruption’ charges? Or is this is a sorry routine of traditional Pakistani power politics? Is this not a chewed-up version of long-defunct EBDO and Proda?

Have we forgotten that the first-ever elected representative to be unceremoniously ousted — twice at that, in 1948 and again in 1951 — was the then Sindh premier Ayub Khuhro when he had developed differences with the Central League leadership. The same Ayub Khuhro, was resurrected and all charges against him dropped with the proverbial single stroke of a pen, when he acquiesced and helped impose One Unit.

Paula R. Newberg’s Judging the State: Courts and constitutional politics in Pakistan puts the history in a broader perspectives than the fairy-tales recounted in school textbooks, so fondly repeated by Imran.

Shafqat Ali

Jamshoro

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2018