Mick Hartley

From cocaine-snorting playboy to Islamist politician and zealot, Imran Khan is back in the news after last week's failed assassination attempt. Kapil Komireddi on the man's poisonous legacy:

The worsening plight of ordinary Pakistanis became the least of Khan’s concerns in office once he set himself up as the tribune of oppressed Muslims and began routinely lashing out at the West and other non-Muslim governments for their treatment of his co-religionists. But just as the preacher of austere faith could reconcile himself allegedly to the ecstasies of cocaine in private, the champion of Muslim dignity made convenient exceptions to his own rules in public.

The man who decried France for its “Islamophobia” gladly pitched for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign even as it sought to smear his Muslim opponent as a terror sympathiser.

Denouncing Indian democracy as a sham and all of India as the 21st-century avatar of Nazi Germany for the depredations of the Hindu-supremacist regime of Narendra Modi, Khan shrugged off the concentration camps in Xinjiang, where China is torturing millions of Muslims by re-enacting some of the most degrading atrocities from the Nazi repertoire. Heading a system that formally grants its religious minorities the status of second-tier citizens, bans them legally from holding the state’s high offices and enshrines capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam in law, Khan pushed a resolution through parliament castigating Emanuel Macron for victimising France’s Muslim minorities. Vilifying the West for its prejudices, he became the most vocal champion and apologist of the Taliban.

Self-unawareness, the condition of leading a state forged in victimhood, matured into self-destructive delusion. Khan equated tweets and incoherent rants against Modi— another exponent of religious nationalism who wants to turn India into a Hindu facsimile of Pakistan—as diplomatic victories for Pakistan. He received succour from supposedly “liberal” voices whose revulsion for Modi’s brand of nationalism turned them, absurdly, into apologists for Khan’s variant of it.

In the end, it was Pakistan’s military that became unsettled by Khan’s ruinous fixations. Khan, who turned up in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s esteemed guest on the day the Russian president launched the invasion of Ukraine, had become intolerable even for an outfit that has supported terrorism for decades. The ringmasters had treated him as a pliable monkey; but he, addled by power, was going rogue and threatening to burn down the lucrative circus they had built.

Now he's back making headlines, with reports that his supporters have blockaded motorways around Pakistan’s capital Islamabad as they step up their efforts to topple the government. We haven't heard the last from the regrettable Mr Khan.