New Delhi: On Friday, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote a column for the British newspaper, Daily Mail, voicing concern for Pakistan’s Imran Khan and his three-year long incarceration. Terming the imprisonment as a ‘global scandal’, Johnson urged Britain to ‘use its influence’ to help free Khan.
‘At the moment I am afraid that it looks as though the Pakistanis are actively hoping that he will die in jail. That would be a serious stain on the country’s reputation,’ Johnson writes.
A dominant figure in Pakistani politics, Imran Khan was detained in August 2023, handed a three-year jail term on charges of corruption. Since his ouster as Prime Minister in 2022, when he lost power in a no-confidence vote, he has faced multiple cases of corruption, including the sale of state gifts, receiving land bribery, and the leaking of state secrets. Most of the cases against him have either been suspended or overturned. He and his wife, Bushra Bibi, are currently serving a 14-year prison sentence in one of the cases.
Defending Khan, Johnson writes that nothing he has said or done during his term justifies the way he is being treated by the current dispensation in Islamabad. ‘You can object to some of the attitudes he struck, and to his teenage anti-Americanism, but nothing he said or did can conceivably justify the brutality with which the Pakistani generals are treating the former PM.’
He alleges that the former PM is being incarcerated because the current rulers fear his popularity. ‘What the Pakistani generals fear is that if they let him out, his millions of fans in Pakistan will simply bear him aloft to a tumultuous victory in the next available election. That is why they are treating him with such cruelty.’
‘The Field Marshal has nothing to fear from a 73-year-old man in poor health, and it would be the obvious and humane thing to let Imran out, and if necessary keep him under house arrest pending his appeal,’ he adds.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)