ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has written a letter to the chief of the country’s powerful army, General Asim Munir, and urged him to reconsider existing policies to end political instability in the country, Khan’s lawyer said on Monday.
The development comes amid renewed political tensions between Khan-led opposition and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government in Pakistan, following the breakdown of weeks-long talks between the two sides. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party accuses the government of causing the breakdown by failing to release political prisoners and establish judicial commissions to investigate violent protests of May 9, 2023, and Nov. 26, 2024. The government says Khan’s party walked away from the talks “unilaterally” before they had a chance to address the PTI’s demands.
Khan’s ouster in a parliamentary no-trust vote in 2022 has plunged Pakistan into a political crisis, particularly since he was jailed in August 2023 on corruption and other charges and remains behind bars. His PTI party and supporters have regularly held protests calling for his release, with many of the demonstrations turning violent.
Speaking to reporters in Rawalpindi, Khan’s lawyer Faisal Chaudhry said the ex-premier has detailed six points in his letter, which he considers the reasons behind a growing divide between the country’s armed forces and the Pakistani people, and says that a change in current policies was the “need of the hour.”
“The first of all reasons, according to Imran Khan, is the rigging of Feb. 8, [2024] election,” he said. “This is the first point due to which a gulf was created between people and the institutions [armed forces].”
Pakistan held its general election on Feb. 8, 2024 that was marred by a mobile Internet shutdown and unusually delayed results. The polls threw up a hung National Assembly and were followed by weeks of protests by opposition parties over allegations of rigging and vote count fraud. The government and election authorities deny any systematic rigging of polls.
Khan last month called on his party’s members and supporters from all walks of life to mark Feb. 8 as a “Black Day” and hold protests across the country to protest alleged rigging of last year’s polls.
“Second, the judiciary in Pakistan has been controlled under the 26th constitutional amendment and the 26th constitutional amendment was brought to bulldoze justice system in the country,” Chaudhry said as he quoted Khan, saying the amendment was aimed at providing a cover to the “election fraud.”
The amendment empowered parliament to pick the country’s top judge among other changes.
The lawyer also said Khan’s letter mentioned among other things the recent amendments to the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) that he said were aimed at stifling dissent on social media, a crackdown on his party’s members and supporters, violation of various court orders, and alleged threats to judges and journalists that were widening the divide between the armed forces and the Pakistani people.
Khan fell out with Pakistan army’s top leaders in the lead-up to his ouster from the PM’s office, and has since led an unprecedented campaign of defiance against the all-powerful army, which has ruled the South Asian country for nearly half of its 75-year history, and even when not in power, it is considered the invisible guiding hand in politics. The army has in recent years said it no longer interferes in politics.
Tensions between Khan’s PTI and the army further heightened after Khan’s brief arrest on May 9, 2023, in a land graft case that sparked countrywide protests, with PTI supporters attacking and ransacking military installations in an unprecedented backlash against the army.
The military has called the day of the protests a “Black Day” and vowed to punish those involved. Since then, thousands of Khan’s supporters have been arrested and dozens of his top party members have defected after they faced increasing pressure from the military establishment to do so, according to his supporters. The army denies it.
“Policies need to be changed swiftly and they should be kept in accordance with the constitution and law, so that political instability in the country may end and the country may move toward stability,” Khan’s lawyer said.
“As long as these policies are not changed, it is difficult for the country to reach a point of stability.”
Ex-PM Khan urges Pakistan army chief to reconsider policies to end political instability
https://arab.news/46k3g
Ex-PM Khan urges Pakistan army chief to reconsider policies to end political instability
- The development comes amid renewed political tensions between Imran Khan-led opposition and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government in Pakistan
- Pakistan’s army has ruled the country for nearly half of its history, though it has denied in recent years that it no longer interferes in the country’s politics
Walnut tree remains ‘under arrest’ for over a century, living symbol of colonial power in Pakistan
- British officer is said to have ordered chaining of the tree in 1898, a reminder of the absolute authority and psychological control enforced under colonial rule in Khyber Pass region
- Locals and historians say the shackled tree survives as a physical memory of the Frontier Crimes Regulation era, when even nature could be punished to discipline subjects and display power
LANDI KOTAL, KHYBER: In the military cantonment of Landi Kotal, close to Pakistan’s Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan and the mouth of the historic Khyber Pass, a single walnut tree stands bound in heavy iron chains.
It has been this way for more than a century, a surreal, almost absurd monument to the power structures and punitive imagination of the British Empire’s rule in the tribal frontier.
Black shackles still brace parts of its branches, giving it the appearance of a theatrical installation. To locals, it is a wound that never fully healed, a reminder that even nature could be punished when authority wished to show dominance.
Local oral histories trace the origin of this bizarre imprisonment to 1898, when a British officer named James Squid, allegedly intoxicated, believed the tree was moving toward him and instantly ordered it arrested. Soldiers carried out the instruction and the walnut tree has never been freed since.
Muhammad Sardar, the caretaker who oversees the site today, recounted the story as it has been passed down for generations.
“This British military official at that time was drunk and thought this walnut tree was moving toward him to attack him,” he told Arab News. “The officer ordered to arrest this tree, hence the soldiers had to obey the order and arrest this tree.”
Whether the event unfolded exactly as described is impossible to verify, but historians and residents agree on what the continued chaining represented: the unquestionable authority of colonial power.
A LAW THAT COULD BIND PEOPLE — AND TREES
Landi Kotal was one of the most militarized points of the British-controlled frontier, a strategic chokepoint along the Khyber Pass, a route armies, traders and empires have used for thousands of years. To control the region, the British introduced the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), a law that denied locals the right to appeal, hire lawyers or challenge government decisions. Entire tribes could be punished for the suspected action of one member.
The chained walnut tree is often interpreted as a physical embodiment of that era: a warning made visible.
Dr. Syed Waqar Ali Shah, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Peshawar, said the symbolism was deliberate.
“It was an assertion of their [British] authority, it was a symbol of their power. Right. It’s a funny thing as well, because it’s something which was under the influence of some intoxication,” he explained.
“The officer behaved or gave orders for the imprisonment of that particular tree under the influence of some intoxicants.”
Dr. Shah continued:
“It was something which was a symbol of colonial authority, assertion of their authority, of bureaucratic diplomacy, a symbol of their bureaucratic strength and power, and maybe some cultural encounter as well.”
He added that such displays endured because “it was a cultural link between the locals and the colonial power. So it was a reflection of that. But later on, they continued with it in the presence of FCR (Frontier Crimes Regulation) and regulations like this.”
Even once the officer sobered, the chains remained.
Dr. Shah believes that was intentional: psychological messaging meant to instill conformity and fear in people living under colonial law.
“Their objective and purpose was to make it a symbol of discipline for the masses. It was an exhibition of power, a sheer exhibition of power, a symbol that if we can do this to something which was inhuman … if they can deal with a tree like this, so the general public, they should be aware that discipline is very important.”
Landi Kotal’s older residents say their fathers and grandfathers retold the story long before Pakistan existed and long before independence movements dismantled the Raj.
Usman Khan Shinwari, a 26-year-old shopkeeper, said the story continues to live in households like a family inheritance.
“My grandfather would often narrate this story of the arrested tree,” he recalled. “My grandfather would say that it shows how the then rulers were treating the locals and what our ancestors had endured.”
Over a century later, long after the end of British rule and the formal abolition of the Frontier Crimes Regulation in 2018, the walnut tree remains exactly where it was chained, part spectacle, part scar.
Tourists sometimes come to photograph it. Others stand silently before it.
But for many in Khyber, it is neither attraction nor curiosity.
It is proof that power once flowed one way only. A tree could be punished, so people learned not to resist.
