Daily Times

Sir: under Narendra Modi’s initiative, Indian Civil Service has begun to blow its propaganda trumpet in foreign affairs as well. An article by RK Kushik (a serving Indian Administrative Service Officer) churns out pernicious allegations against Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime-minister-to-be (The Statesman dated August 8, 2018). He sees Imran Khan as a “close ally and protégé of its Establishment (Army and ISI)”, a product of “rigged elections” and “pliable judiciary”.

Imran Khan himself has been an ardent critic of so-called Establishment. In his autobiography (Imran Khan, Pakistan, A personal History), he blamed the Inter-Services Intelligence for his inability to bag more than one seat in the first election he contested. He claims “No politician in country’s history up till then had ever beaten the establishment” (p.225). (ISI’s Major-General Ehtisham) “Zamir gave me the ISI’s assessment of how many seats each party could get in the autumn elections… Sadly this has been a legacy of intelligence agencies in Pakistan, who without a proper broad based analysis, have made decisions which have proved disastrous for our country. This was my first experience of dealing with the ISI”, p. 222-223. “Consequently a lot of potentially good candidates abandoned us. The ones that were left were turned on by the ISI; its agents either threatened the Tehreek-e-Insaf candidates or cajoled or lured them into Musharraf’s PML(Q). Some candidates gave up altogether, telling me they could not fight the ISI. They said they would be wasting their money”. It is only for political expediency that Imran Khan is now allied with the symbol of the status-quo: the PML-Q. Pervaiz Elahi is now being tipped as the next speaker for the Punjab Assembly. He was earlier called “Punjab’s biggest daku (robber)” by Imran Khan, during his term as Punjab’s chief minister from 2002 to 2008 (for massive loan write-offs).

Anti-Pakistan articles by serving officers in Modi’s India do not augur well for the future of Indo-Pak relations.

MOHAMMAD SA’AD MALIK

Islamabad

Published in Daily Times, August 10^th 2018.