View: Imran Khan a success as fly that walked into the spider’s parlour

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly; and in rushed Imran Khan, throwing caution to the wind. At least after he heard Prime Minister Modi speak at the UN General Assembly, devoting himself to a positive description of a large, complex country winning the battle against backwardness and seeking to lead the world in combating climate change and ending the menace plastic poses to the environment, refraining from any hostile remark about any other country, save for a reference to the menace of terrorism, Khan should have altered his prepared speech. But he did not. He went ahead and ranted and raved about India, Kashmir, the RSS and nuclear destruction. India came across as a responsible, leading member of the comity of nations, Pakistan as a diffident troublemaker. In the battle of appearances, Pakistan lost, and badly.

Of course, the Indian prime minister’s platitudes hide the ugly reality of schism his politics has fuelled in India. He took credit for India’s culture that celebrates unity in diversity and reiterated his slogan of standing with everyone and working for the progress of all, even as his government is pursuing an agenda of isolating and targeting Muslims across the land, by proposing to create a National Register of Citizens, on the lines of such a register that has recently been finalised for Assam, which has labelled 19 lakh people as aliens, liable to be held in detention centres and thrown out. His partymen claim that the proposed citizenship bill would make sure that no Hindu is declared an alien. And if you are a Muslim? The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

India’s economy is in thrall to serious structural defects: a power sector where people are conditioned to believe that it is okay not to pay for the power they consume, a farm sector where harmful incentives misalign crops and the agro-climatic conditions suited for them, a dysfunctional legal system and broken financial intermediation. Since Modi’s personal popularity has broken the correlation between economic mismanagement and the leader’s political fortunes, the government has not bothered to spend political capital to fix these structural defects.


Opposition leaders are being threatened and sent to jail on assorted charges, not just in Kashmir or the political periphery, but at the centre of India’s polity.

All this is fodder for robust criticism of India’s present government. Considering that India’s own Opposition is having a tough time creating a credible, coherent narrative out of this, it is perhaps not so surprising that Imran Khan, leading a country that uses terror as an instrument of state policy, could not do much at the UN, except to behave like a fly flailing at the sticky strands that ensnare it.

Views expressed by the author are his own