Civil Unrest in Pakistan following Ousting of Khan

With the ousting of yet another corrupt head of state, Pakistan is on the verge of civil unrest as bipartisan politics spills over into the masses.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, was forcibly removed from his position through a No Confidence motion in the state legislature.

Typically of Pakistani politics, the vote was successful as a result of Khan’s political party members switching side to vote against him during the No Confidence motion vote.

As reported in The Guardian, the split in party politics has spilled over to the general population.

Earlier this week saw one of Imran Khan’s party members, who voted against him during the No Confidence vote- Noor Alam Khan, get assaulted in public by an ardent supporter of Khan who branded him as a traitor.

“I have been harassed and faced death threats since I announced that I would vote against Imran Khan in the no-confidence vote,” he said. “I have received phone calls saying: we will kill you and your children like Benazir Bhutto [former prime minister who was assassinated] because you are an American agent and betrayed prime minister Imran Khan.”

Similar chaos ensued on Saturday at a gathering of the Punjab assembly meant to be discussing the election of a new chief minister , as supporters of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and opposition lawmakers began to aggressively confront each other and the deputy speaker, Sardar Dost Muhammad Mazari, was attacked by members of the treasury benches.

After losing the support of the powerful military, the opposition moved in with a no-confidence vote, backed by many from Khan’s own coalition who had lost faith in the prime minister. Shehbaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition coalition and brother of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, was elected by the national assembly to succeed him.

Evoking popular anti-western sentiment that he has played on for the past four years in office, Khan has continued to push the narrative that the no-confidence vote which ousted him was a “foreign conspiracy” by the west, citing diplomatic correspondence with the US to prove it.

The US vehemently denied it and no definitive proof of a conspiracy has been shown. In a rare press conference on Thursday, Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar, the spokesperson of the armed forces, dismantled Khan’s narrative and rejected the claim that a diplomatic cable contained evidence of foreign interference.

On the streets of cities and towns across Pakistan, the narrative that Khan was victim to a western conspiracy has been powerful and pervasive, and thousands have continued to come out in protest in support of him.”

Meanwhile relations between China and Pakistan are becoming ever more strained as separatist movements in Pakistan target Chinese projects in their attacks.

The Baloch Liberation Army has warned that more attacks against Chinese funded project will occur in the future.

Last Tuesday (19) the Baloch Liberation Army carried out a suicide bomb attack on Karachi’s Confucius Institute on Tuesday.

The suicide bomb attack killed three Chinese teachers and a local driver in the port city of Karachi.

The bomber in the Karachi attack was identified as 30-year-old Shaari Baloch, a married mother of two who had been studying for a master’s degree at the university.

“Pakistan is a major recipient of China’s Belt and Road funding, aimed principally at the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a suite of infrastructure schemes with an estimated value of $62bn.

The corridor depends on access to Balochistan and in particular the newly built deepwater port of Gwadar. In August last year, two children were killed and three wounded in an attack targeting Chinese nationals in the port.

China has fallen foul of a long-running insurgency in the province, carried out by groups seeking a greater share of their province’s natural resources. In the past, attacks have been launched on natural gas projects, infrastructure and the Pakistani security forces.

However, the whole of the corridor has been subjected to attacks in the past few years. In April 2021, the Taliban claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attack at a hotel hosting the Chinese ambassador in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. That incident left four dead and dozens wounded.

And the following July, a bus carrying engineers to a construction site near a dam in northwest Pakistan was hit by a bomb, killing 13 people including nine Chinese workers (see further reading). Pakistan later paid millions in compensation to the families of the Chinese workers killed,” according to the GlobalConstructionReview.com

With such attacks against Chinese project ongoing support of china and its interests in Pakistan are severely threated. -By Govinda Kapoor