New Delhi: A Guardian article criticising former Pakistan PM Imran Khan has riled his supporters back home, who are actively canvassing for the jailed leader to win the post of chancellor at Oxford University. They are calling the article racist and biased against a man of colour.
The stinging opinion article by Catherine Bennett, published Sunday, calls Khan a Taliban-friendly person who could not tolerate Salman Rushdie and labelled him a blasphemer while hailing Osama bin Laden as a martyr, refusing to recognise him as a terrorist.
It goes on to state that he excused the Taliban’s ban on women’s education and calls out his belief on rape—“that women should remove ‘temptation’, because ‘not everyone has willpower’.” According to Bennett, if Khan wants to give back to his alma mater, he should simply withdraw.
“If the election of Oxford chancellor can appear, including from within the potential voting pool, roughly as significant as crown choices at the state opening of parliament, unprecedented campaigning for a Taliban-friendly candidate suggests, however, that if the prize is worth exploiting, it must also be worth defending,” the article reads.
Recounting his support of China and open praise of the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the country, Bennett concludes by expressing support for another candidate, Lady Elish Angiolini, whose priority is “to make Oxford more accessible to poorer students”.
War of X posts
The article has now led to an online war of words between the supporters and opponents of Khan.
While political parties like PMLN cashed in on the article, calling it a ‘global embarrassment’ that exposes the “true face of Imran Naizi”, his supporters are calling it a ‘paid article by the Pakistan army’.
Khan’s supporters are also now pulling out decade-old interviews such as the one Khan gave to Indian journalist Barkha Dutt, to show the true reason behind Khan’s refusal to share the stage with Rushdie, citing ‘the pain he had caused to billions of people in the universe.’
Former Federal Minister Murtaza Solangi asked the newspaper to keep reposting the article every hour. Another PMLN leader Hina Parvez Butt wrote on X, “How can a Taliban supporter, convicted in corruption cases, Tosha Khana thief become a chancellor of Oxford? The Guardian has opened Niazi’s raw material.”
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Racism and hypocrisy
Another X user, however, called the article racist. “Catherine’s column seems to promote a racist perspective by unfairly associating Imran Khan with the Taliban, disregarding his emphasis on dialogue and peaceful solutions over conflict. It is disappointing to read her article, which appears biased against a man of colour,” he wrote.
Many are also pointing out that it is hypocritical for the UK to call Khan a Taliban apologist since the US and UK were behind the militant group’s formation. None of Khan’s supporters, however, addressed the critique of his views on rape.
In her article, Bennett vouches for an ‘apolitical and respected’ woman to break the trail of male chancellors.
“Mercifully for anyone voting in October, the one outstanding candidate, already an asset to the university, is also female, apolitical and respected. Lady Elish Angiolini, a lawyer … became Scotland’s first female procurator fiscal and its first female lord advocate… Having headed official reviews on policing, rape and deaths in custody, she now chairs the Angiolini inquiry into the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard,” the article states.
Bennett’s scathing article attracted massive criticism on social media—but it was directed at her namesake.
Khan’s supporters started attacking a different journalist with the same name. Things got so bad that she had to issue a clarification: “The other journalist called Catherine Bennett wrote a column about Imran Khan… RIP my mentions as the entirety of Pakistani Twitter turns on me.”
The irony was not lost on Pakistanis, though. In a reply to her post, an X user wrote, “If you were a premium member, you would be receiving checks this month too.”
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)