Why Imran Khan's probable exit matters for India

The Ascent

Imran Khan Niazi shot into prominence in the early 1980s due to his bowling prowess and ability to bat a little. In India, the obvious comparison was with India's very own Haryana hurricane,

Kapil Dev Ramlal Nikhanj. Khan shot to immortality in 1992 after he won his country the Cricket World Cup. Forming the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) in 1997, he did not find traction in the political arena initially as he would have expected. In election after election, the PTI would be an also-ran but continued to make noise at the national level, ultimately reaching the membership number of 10 million supporters in Pakistan and abroad. With Benazir Bhutto's assassination in 2007 and Nawaz Sharif's exile to Saudi Arabia, Imran Khan's fate took a turn, and the number of votes for the PTI swelled in the following elections, leading up to his installation as Pakistan's prime minister in 2018, on the platform of anti-corruption and reforms.

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The situation now

Continuing in Pakistan's tryst with democracy, where no prime minister has ever completed the stipulated five-year term, Khan faces a no-confidence motion on April 3. No prime minister has ever been ousted via a no-confidence motion either. He is pitted against a coalition of three opposition parties, who came together in 2020. There are murmurs that some of his own party are ready to switch sides during the vote. The charges a combined opposition has levelled against Khan's government are corruption, inflation and his antagonistic brand of politics.

According to the media in Pakistan, with the exit of ally Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P), the PTI-led ruling coalition is down to 164. The opposition now has the support of 175 legislators. The PTI-led coalition government needs the support of at least 172 legislators in the 342-member National Assembly to survive the April 3 vote.

Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the son of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari, both previous rulers of Pakistan, has said Shehbaz Sharif, the leader of the Opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly, could soon be the next prime minister. Bilawal claimed the prime minister was destined to be deposed, and the new National government would replace him until the next elections.

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On Sunday, Khan's fate will be sealed – whether he continues as the prime minister or awaits his turn to test the waters in the elections slated for 2023.

How did Khan get here?

Upon his appointment as the prime minister in 2018, Imran Khan was initially dubbed as Pakistan military's puppet, which probably he was. But in a couple of years, he came into his own and managed to upset the powers to be. The acrimony between him and the military came to a head last year when he dragged his feet in agreeing with the military's nomination, Lt Gen Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, as ISI's new chief. Khan had apparently wanted to install one of his own loyalists, but the military finally had its way in the Fall of 2021.

In his attempts of branching away from the military's influence, Khan perhaps overstretched his arms and dropped the ball on Pakistan's relationship with the United States. As late as February 2022, he visited China and Russia in the wake of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He was pressed upon by the military bosses to issue statements about the war in Ukraine, which he resisted. The situation was compounded by his very public cold-shouldering by the Biden administration – he is yet to receive a phone call from the new US president – in the wake of Pakistan's support of the Taliban government in neighbouring Afghanistan. The exit from Afghanistan was a low point in US foreign policy, and the government it had so liberally funded for decades did not come out in its support.

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Almost as icing on the cake, when Pakistan's military said it favoured an open and neutral foreign policy, addressing a public gathering at Dir Scouts ground in Balambat area in Lower Dir district, Imran Khan said, "Humans are never neutral, only animals were." This singular statement perhaps served as the last nail in the coffin and will inevitably come back to bite him, as an animal would.

Implications for India

The four wars that India and Pakistan have fought were in 1947, right after the partition over Kashmir, 1965, 1971 and 1999. The last three were fought when Field Marshal General Ayub Khan (1965), General Yahya Khan (1971) and General Pervez Musharraf (1999) ruled Pakistan. In 2019, Imran Khan had facilitated the return of the Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman to India as a "goodwill gesture", dubbed a masterstroke by media globally and served to de-escalate the tension between the two countries. It remains in India's interest that democracy prevails in the neighbouring country.

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The aftermath

Post the no-confidence motion this week, a few different scenarios could present themselves. The first being that Imran Khan survives the vote and continues as the prime minister. Unbeknownst to the opposition coalition, he may have struck a deal with the military in a meeting this past Wednesday. If he survives, he will be a much more subdued and weaker prime minister. The second scenario could be a National government headed by the former three-time chief minister of Punjab, Mohammad Shehbaz Sharif. This would be a stop-gap arrangement ahead of the elections next year. A third option is the possibility of an early election. Perhaps in anticipation of the third option, a 'battle for Pakistan' rally was held in the capital, Islamabad, by Khan and his supporters.

During his time as the world's eminent fast bowler, Imran Khan Niazi was famous for taking fivers (or five wickets in an innings, he repeated the feat 24 times). It remains to be seen if he will complete a 'fiver' (five years) as Pakistan's prime minister in his latest avatar.

(The author is a former Chief of Communications with UNICEF in New York, where he worked for more than a decade.)

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