Imran Khan has become the stalker of Pakistan’s politics: that inconvenient ex that insists on not leaving the party. Despite a non-bailable warrant, two days of pitched battles and a fog of teargas, the police in Lahore failed in its mid-week attempt to arrest the former PM. Imran, recovering from an assassination attempt and voluble on social media, issued a grim farewell message to his supporters, exhorting them to continue the agitation for ‘real freedom’ even in his absence.
The dramatic signing off, reminiscent of Bhutto’s ‘If I am assassinated’ message from his death cell in 1978, was followed by a slew of defiant interviews to foreign media. The former cricket star emerged unscathed, after his ‘supporters’, bizarrely including elements of the Gilgit-Baltistan police, fended off local cops and after the courts gave him a temporary reprieve.
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