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With Pakistan seeking an IMF loan, Imran Khan will struggle to keep up his rhetoric
It is two months since Imran Khan became Pakistan’s Prime Minister with the very partisan and public support and assistance from Pakistan’s military and its clandestine organisations, when his main opponent, Nawaz Sharif, and his daughter were put behind bars following a highly controversial and dubious legal judgment. Yet, Mr. Khan has still not discovered the fact that being a populist rabble rouser in Opposition, at which he was particularly good, is very different from being an elected leader with serious responsibilities and consequences, where sombre reality sobers down even the most exaggerated claims and promises. These last few weeks have only reinforced the appellation, ‘U-Turn Khan’, used for Mr. Khan on numerous occasions in the past, regarding his various statements about what all he intends to do. From making exaggerated promises that he would break Pakistan’s begging bowl; that he would “rather commit suicide” than go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF); that his government would be one of new, clean faces, all chosen on high standards of merit; that his government would end nepotism of every kind in every public office; that he would bring back the supposedly $200 billion “looted wealth in 100 days”; and so on, he has had to backtrack on all these claims and dozens of others, made at different times in different stages of exuberance. The most consequential of decisions which Mr. Khan’s government has had to take in its two months so far is to go to the IMF asking for a loan estimated to be an unprecedented $10-15 billion. This will be Pakistan’s 13th IMF loan since the 1980s, and also probably the largest. In addition, the political conditions surrounding IMF loan disbursement have changed considerably for Pakistan since the good old days of the War on Terror, when the U.S. perceived Pakistan to be a particularly close ally when such loans were disbursed somewhat leniently and with slipping standards of monitoring and surveillance, with numerous waivers given on unmet tasks and targets. This time, for a host of reasons, the conditionalities and the political baggage behind being approved for the loan will be particularly heavy, with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo already having stated that the U.S. would be “watching what the IMF does”. He said: “There’s no rationale for IMF tax dollars, and associated with that American dollars that are part of the IMF funding… to go to bail out Chinese bondholders or China itself.” In fact, the IMF Managing Director has also stated that the IMF would require “absolute transparency” of debts owed to China. Clearly, a different geopolitics is being played out in Pakistan today compared to that of two decades ago. One of the first statements uttered by Mr. Khan a few hours after he realised he was to become Prime Minister of Pakistan was his promise to make Pakistan into Prophet Muhammad’s Islamic welfare state of the Medina of his time. When he was launching his Housing Scheme, Mr. Khan tried to allay the fears of his audience about the impending economic crisis and told them, “ Ghabrain nahin, hausla rakhain (do not worry, have fortitude).” Perhaps the chasm between populist promises and hard realities in Pakistan can only be filled by faith, belief and a prayer.
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/populism-confronts-reality/article25291870.ece
