The good, bad and ugly: Imran Khan’s 2019 government
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Saying that 2019 was a roller coaster ride for the Imran Khan government is an understatement. It was the first full calendar year for the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in power at the federal level, with both the prime minister and his party struggling to deliver on their promise of creating a Naya ‘new’ Pakistan.
It was a bleak year overall in socio-politico-economic terms for Pakistan, seen from the perspective of citizens who struggled to abide by Imran Khan’s repeated public assurances of: “Don’t panic!” A case of easier said than done.
While 2019 was the year the public’s romance with the idea of Khan as the founder of a new and improved Pakistan began to sour, it also threw several curveballs at the government- both brickbats and bouquets.
Undoubtedly, in handling India, Khan showed his best side. In February 2019, when Indian warplanes crossed Pakistani borders for the first time since their last full-war in 1971 and bombed its territory, Islamabad did the unthinkable: it refused to take the bait and strike back militarily. Instead, it downed an Indian plane, captured the pilot, gave him a cup of tea and handed him back to the Indian Air Force.
After Delhi went on to constitutionally annex the part of Kashmir administered by its government, Pakistan refused to deal with the fallout militarily in defiance of public demand and instead fought a diplomatic battle. Both strategies were Pakistan at its best – defying the global perception of it being the provocateur and aggressor, and successfully leaving India to battle the political fallout instead.
While 2019 was the year the public’s romance with the idea of Khan as the founder of a new and improved Pakistan began to sour, the year also threw several curveballs at the government- both brickbats and bouquets.
Adnan Rehmat
Furthermore, Khan pulled the plug on farcical accountability. In the final days of 2019, Khan all but de-fanged the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), which in 2019 was marred by accusations of carrying out witch-hunts against opposition leaders. Khan was courageous in indirectly conceding that his narrative regarding the political opposition being unequivocally corrupt had produced no convictions and no martyrs.
Another big, euphoric win for Khan’s government was restoring Test cricket in the country after a 10-year hiatus by hosting a competitive Sri Lanka. Nothing unites Pakistanis like cricket, and none of the current team members had ever played a Test at home before! They made the best of it, breaking decades’ old international game records.
But it hasn’t all been rosy. Perhaps the greatest thorn in Khan’s side is that his party does not specialize in handling the economy. This was clear when his entire economic team was sacked and outside experts on the economy, taxation and fiscal management were brought in, albeit too late in the day for the year to be a good one. The result: soaring energy prices and shortages, double-digit inflation, record tax collection deficit and expanding unemployment. In his last public speech of the year, Khan almost apologized — and promised to do better in 2020.
Khan’s scorched-earth politics and refusal to attend the National Assembly has also sidelined parliament. A record lack of legislation and increasing reliance on ordinances (temporary laws) has resulted in parliament becoming all but redundant. This also stifled any chances of political and legal reforms, whose promises brought PTI to power.
It is also no secret that Imran Khan’s government increasingly outsourced policy direction to Pakistan’s powerful military establishment- from foreign to interior and economic policies.
But where things got really ugly, were the PTI’s legal blunders. Khan’s party made some of the worst mistakes in the country’s legal history. Among others, it bungled a straightforward case of extending the retirement of an incumbent army chief into an existential crisis for him. It also demonstrated not just an inability to defend key cases in courts such as the Musharraf treason case, which handed him a death sentence, but also contemptuously ripped apart one of the judges of the case through slurs and filed a reference against another judge for being too assertive.
That’s not the worst of it.
The PTI government’s worst moments came in the way it hounded the opposition in the name of accountability — driven by Khan’s inflexible contempt for political processes. And it was this, added to his impatience with the legal system for not assuming his opponents were guilty-until-proven-innocent, that truly exposed the Prime Minister’s democratic immaturity.
*Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
