- Saturday, March 01, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Pakistan’s leading newspapers on Wednesday (10) commented that the arrest of the country’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, and the widespread violence that erupted in its wake showed that “removing” the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader from the picture will solve nothing and would plunge the nation facing an acute economic crisis further into “chaos and unrest”.
“Imran Khan has been arrested, and the Rubicon crossed. The breakout of fresh hostilities between the PTI and the state means any hopes of a negotiated breakthrough in the ongoing political stalemate can be put to rest,” the Dawn newspaper wrote in an editorial.
Though interior minister Rana Sanullah linked the arrest with a corruption investigation, the recent developments and Khan’s fresh confrontation with the armed forces suggest that he may have been picked up for an entirely different reason, it said.
“The fact that it was the Punjab Rangers and not the Islamabad Police which was sent in to nab him from the Islamabad High Court’s premises seems to support the latter thesis,” the newspaper pointed out.
The 70-year-old cricketer-turned-politician was taken into custody by the paramilitary Rangers on Tuesday (9) on the orders of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) by barging into a room of the Islamabad High Court when he came to attend a corruption case hearing.
“The country is undergoing a poly-crisis at the moment and it appears that none of the stakeholders are focused on firefighting. Political leaders are prioritising short-term interests over those of the nation, and that is applicable across the board,” The Nation newspaper commented.
As far as Khan is concerned, his routine tirades are only increasing polarisation across the country and are bringing disrepute to the country’s institutions at a time when you need all hands on deck, it said, apparently referring to the serious economic crisis faced by Pakistan.
The South Asian nation is tackling a major economic crisis as it awaits a much-needed $1.1 billion tranche of funding from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, part of a $6.5 billion bailout package the IMF approved in 2019.
“This development will only plunge the country further into chaos and unrest. Even if the arrest is legal, the optics surrounding it are quite problematic. This was part of a NAB investigation, but there was no NAB officer present at the time of the arrest,” the paper added.
The Pakistani rupee weakened 1.3 per cent to a new low of Rs 288.5 against the greenback in the interbank market on Wednesday, a day after Khan was arrested, the Dawn reported.
The Dawn further opined that the violence and protest showed that public anger was directed at the military and the video footage recorded at various protests suggested that the people were angry enough to cross lines no one dared cross before.
Protests broke out in the country as the news of Khan’s arrest went viral, with his supporters armed with batons targeting the installations of security institutions, including the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army.
They paid no heed to the imposition of Section 144 that outlawed gatherings in Punjab, Balochistan and major places in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. Some of the worst incidents of violence and vandalism were reported from Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi and Rawalpindi.
The PTI overnight claimed at least two deaths and dozens of injuries of its workers in clashes with law enforcement agencies. The events of the last 13 months have seen the military’s past — especially with respect to its political meddling — rapidly catching up with it amidst Pakistan’s unprecedented poly-crisis, the Dawn newspaper wrote in an editorial. When Khan recently once again accused a senior intelligence officer of conspiring to assassinate him, Khan was well aware that he was, in fact, pointing a finger directly at the present military leadership.
He over the past year has rallied enough public support behind him that his words now carry a weight that the establishment seems to feel it can no longer ignore. “However, removing Khan from the picture solves nothing. Instead, as the protests yesterday showed, arresting him may have deeply fractured the historic compact between the people and the country’s armed forces,” the editorial in the Dawn read.
The provocation of Khan’s arrest has only led the government and establishment deeper into controversy and will engender even greater public distrust in their policies. This is the last thing the country needs, teetering as it is on the verge of an all-out default, it said.
The arrest of Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in April 2022, represented the latest confrontation to roil Pakistan. The country was facing a deadlock over the timing of provincial and federal elections, an issue that has rocked the country’s politics for months. The talks were held in the backdrop of the controversy with Khan’s PTI party seeking early polls – particularly in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces where assemblies were dissolved in January – and the government led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) maintaining that provincial and federal elections across the country be held on the same day in October.
(With PTI inputs)
