Removing One Person Does Not Make the Question Disappear

How many times has Pakistan learned this lesson in eight decades, and how many times has it forgotten it?

Abdul Rehman Patel

Reading Pakistan’s history, one sometimes feels that instead of moving forward, we keep traveling in circles.

The characters change. Governments change. Uniforms change. Political parties change. Even the methods used to neutralize political opponents change.

Yet one question remains:

If a popular political leader becomes a problem for the existing power structure, should that leader be defeated politically, or removed from the political arena altogether?

This question is almost as old as Pakistan’s political history.

Fatima Jinnah challenged Ayub Khan in 1965 and lost, but the democratic question she represented did not disappear.

In 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won a clear parliamentary majority, yet the failure to resolve the transfer of power politically contributed to a crisis that ended with the breakup of Pakistan.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown and eventually executed, but his politics survived him.

Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in 2006, but the Balochistan question remained.

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007 under very different circumstances, yet her political legacy and constituency did not disappear.

These personalities, events and circumstances were very different. They should not be placed in the same historical category.

But they do point toward one recurring lesson:

Removing a person does not necessarily remove the political question that person has come to represent.

And that brings us to Imran Khan.

One can disagree with him. His years in government, treatment of opponents, relationship with the establishment, political decisions and style of governance can and should be questioned.

Democracy does not require us to make any politician sacred.

But the larger question today is not whether Imran Khan is right or wrong.

It is whether a major political force with millions of supporters can be made permanently irrelevant through imprisonment, court cases, administrative pressure or political engineering.

Pakistan’s history gives us little reason to believe that this formula works.

Because ultimately, the voter is more important than the leader.

A politician can be imprisoned.

A party can be pressured.

An electoral symbol can be taken away.

A name can disappear from television screens.

But how do you imprison the question inside a voter’s mind?

This is where the difference between a government and a state becomes important.

A government may want its political opponents weakened.

A state should want its institutions strengthened.

A government may think about the next election.

A state must think about the next generation.

And a strong state is not one where disagreement has been silenced. It is one where even the strongest opponent of those in power believes that the system will treat him fairly.

Perhaps Pakistan does not need another political victor.

Perhaps it needs a political principle:

Let the people decide.

Let those elected by the people govern within the Constitution, and let those rejected by the people leave office.

Let the military perform its constitutional role, the judiciary its role, Parliament its role, journalism its role, and above all, let the people perform theirs.

After almost eight decades, the central question remains remarkably simple:

Has Pakistan learned to resolve political disagreement through political means?

If not, the problem is bigger than Imran Khan, or any one politician or general.

The problem is the recurring belief that removing a person will somehow remove the question that person represents.

History does not always send its bill immediately.

Sometimes it arrives ten years later.

Sometimes twenty.

And sometimes an entire generation pays it.

That is why today’s question should not only be:

What will happen to Imran Khan?

The larger question is:

What will happen to Pakistan after Imran Khan?

Will we once again weaken our institutions, our Constitution and public trust in an effort to defeat one political figure?

Or will we finally learn from our own history?

Because states do not become stronger by eliminating their political opponents.

They become stronger when they have the confidence to guarantee justice even to their strongest opponents.

And perhaps Pakistan’s real choice is this:

Do we need another victor, or finally a system in which the Constitution does not have to lose for someone else to win?