Imran Khan and the Apology Fetish in Pakistan’s State of Terror

The most telling question in Pakistan today is not whether Imran Khan should apologize. This is why so many otherwise intelligent people have decided that the prisoner’s manners matter more than the jailer’s violence.

This is the new sophistication: asking the man in the cell to become more humble, wiser, more thoughtful, more historically self-aware. Ask his subscribers to mature. Ask his party to do some soul-searching. Ask everyone to fine-tune their tone as the state rations light, visitation, medicine, speech, travel, meetings, and the law itself. Pakistan’s accredited prudence class has discovered a remarkable moral technology: it can diagnose the psychological flaws of the persecuted with forensic precision while referring to the persecutor only by atmospheric names – “the establishment”, “the courts”, “the institutions”, “the stakeholders”. Apparently, dictatorship is now a climatic phenomenon.

Let’s be clear. Political criticism of Imran Khan is legitimate. The criticism of the PTI is legitimate. Criticism of Khan’s contradictions, compromises, rhetoric and political evolution is necessary. No serious politics is based on holiness. But when the state has made a political figure the central object of its elimination, being obsessed with apologizing while tiptoeing around the architecture of repression is not courage. This is a moral error. This is dissent expressed on the safe side of the prison wall.

This is why “Will Imran Khan Apologise?” is not a neutral question. He arrives dressed as an ethical investigation while quietly accepting the framework of the regime. This individualizes the victim and evaporates the aggressor. He wonders if the captive has learned enough, regretted enough, softened enough, while the captor kidnaps, condemns, silences and humiliates with bureaucratic calm. Only one man can decide whether you live in a prison cell or a Serena suite, but polite speech shouldn’t name it too loudly. He is busy making peace in the world.

This is also why so many people reacted so strongly to Javed Ghamidi’s recent discussion with Shehzad Ghias. The outrage was not simply due to disagreement. It was a question of context. As the bombs fall on Iran, when the victims of empire are not debating abstractions but suffering imperial slaughter, treating the issue as a calm intellectual exercise seems morally deranged. Yes, some answers have become ugly and ad hominem, and those should be downvoted. But anger itself was not mysterious. What was blood and rubble for the victims was treated as an impartial seminar leading to a respectable defeat.

The same moral disorder operates here. “Should Khan apologize? might seem reasonable in a studio, college lounge, or air-conditioned republic of ethical hygiene. But amid brutal persecutions, mass arrests, prison isolation, media suppression, fabricated cases and criminalization of a popular movement, the issue becomes something else: a velvet glove gently placed on an iron boot.

Marshal Asim Munir can be presented abroad as a mediator, stabilizer, interlocutor, an indispensable adult in the room. GOOD. Acknowledge every handshake, every channel, every diplomatic triumph. What’s next? That Pakistanis should applaud their jailer because he found a job as a messenger between empires? A state can mediate abroad while waging war at home. Diplomacy does not disinfect repression. Handshakes don’t open prison cells.

The same evasion appears everywhere: Baloch resistance, Pashtun protest, feminist dissidence, legal activism. When Dr Mahrang Baloch is convicted, imprisoned, defamed or secured, should we ask ourselves if she too should apologize? Should Imaan Mazari apologize for being arrested too many times? Should the families of the missing apologize for the lack of nuance? At what point can we stop psychoanalyzing the injured and start naming the machinery that hurts them?

Under Zia, true democrats did not demand that Bhutto or Benazir be perfect before opposing military dictatorship. They understood what today’s intelligent class has lost: it is not necessary to adhere to all the slogans of the persecuted to oppose persecution. Professor Riffat Hassan, Professor Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Tariq Ali and other intellectual and moral giants of the anti-authoritarian struggle do not need to be hypnotized by Imran Khan, placed under a populist spell or recruited into a PTI love affair to recognize brutality when it appears in uniform. They’ve seen this grammar before. They know the smell of managed fear.

This is why the ritual denial around Khan is so degrading. Before saying “stop terrorizing him and his supporters”, we apparently need to do our ablutions: I am not PTI; I don’t agree with everything Khan says; I understand the complexity; I read the theory. It’s the same sick structure imposed on Palestinians: I don’t support Hamas, but please stop bombing children. The victim must first pass an ideological hygiene test before their pain becomes admissible.

And here, a word about Shehzad Ghias. This essay is a political criticism and not a personal denunciation. Shehzad was a gifted student and I was really happy to support his Fulbright scholarship. I have always appreciated his intelligence, his seriousness, his curiosity and his desire to lead difficult conversations in a media culture that is often allergic to risk. I hire him here because I respect him as a thoughtful voice on the left, and serious interlocutors deserve candor, not ceremonial politeness.

When Khan’s approaches to Dr Ammar Ali Jan, Mahmood Khan Achakzai or Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan are treated less like politics than pathology, a familiar pattern reappears: the popular Muslim leader cannot make alliances; he must have symptoms. Its policy cannot evolve; it must reveal the neurosis. Call it Imranophobia if you like. Its deeper grammar is not foreign.

The question in Pakistan is not whether Khan is perfect. This is not the case. The question is whether a state can destroy constitutional politics because one man has become too popular, too rebellious, too electorally embarrassing. Whether the courts are tribunals or suits. Whether law is law or theater. Whether “stability” means law and order or the sedation of a nation.

Make it clear: Personalize the abuser as eagerly as you personalize the victim. If Khan must answer for Khan, then Munir must answer for Munir. Names matter. Power has addresses.

History will not remember who had the more refined reservations about Khan. He will remember who saw the handcuffs and discussed manners.

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Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches law, religion and global politics and is Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), the Movement for the Liberation of the Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/) and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).

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