The former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Jan, has survived an attack this Thursday afternoon in Wazirabad. The politician, who leads a massive motorized march "for freedom", between Lahore and Islamabad, has received a bullet in the leg. Ten people around him have also been injured, one of whom has died. A passer-by who attended the passage of the caravan has been able to reduce the gunman when he had already fired seven or eight shots from an automatic weapon, unleashing a stampede. Once arrested, in a video soon leaked from the police station, the killer has stated that he acted on his own initiative because of his dislike for Jan.
The charismatic former head of government, seventy years old, was able to be evacuated with his shin bandaged, heading to Lahore. There he remains hospitalized and out of danger, after having undergone surgery to remove the bullet shrapnel from the fractured leg.
A spokesman for the Movement for Justice (PTI), Jan's party, has declared that "if the people do not manage to stop the gunman, he liquidates the party's top brass." Much of it was accompanying the secretary-general's motorcade, mounted on the roof of trucks. His right-hand man, Senator Faisal Javed, has appeared on television bloodied and with his cheek bandaged. Another party leader has received a bullet in each leg.
The frustrated attack will only fuel Imran Jan's victim discourse. He considers that all his setbacks in 2022, since he lost power in a controversial motion of censure, are due to "a conspiracy" to remove him from the scene at any price . The bullet in the leg comes a few weeks after his disqualification from holding public office for five years, issued by the Electoral Commission.
The defiant march "for true freedom" -which started last Friday in his city, Lahore- demands the advancement of the general elections, scheduled for next October. The unknown is if Imran Jan, who starts as a great favorite, will be able to appear for them after the opinion of the aforementioned commission. Said disqualification has been appealed by Jan before the High Court of Justice of Islamabad.
Firstly, the Movement for Justice planned to reach the Pakistani capital this Friday to the praise of crowds, but the very success of the call and the slowness of the convoy had made it difficult. The attack opens a new unknown, although from the party it has been said that the march continues.
It is not known when Jan, now convalescing, will be able to retake it, but his objective, once in Islamabad, was to give an unconventional pulse to the coalition government of Shehbaz Sharif. He is has promised an investigation of the attack but has repeated that the elections will be held according to the planned schedule. It should be noted that the military leadership had warned Jan a few days ago that he had "the right to demonstrate" but not "to destabilize".
The political tension in Pakistan is maximum and this Thursday night hundreds of thousands of Pakistani men have spontaneously demonstrated in the main cities, to express their outrage at the attack. Jan's party is sweeping every fringe election since his ouster, despite all the legal stumbling blocks.
As is known, the 70-year-old former captain of the cricket team accuses Sharif without evidence of being in charge of an "import government" installed "by the United States." This month, moreover, ends the mandate of the Chief of the Armed Forces, a true shadow power in Pakistan. Jan's urgency is motivated in part by his desire to influence the nomination of his successor.
In fact, the rise of Imran Jan had the sympathy of the Armed Forces. The harmony was maintained while Rawalpindi's number one interest was to extirpate Indian influence in Afghanistan, sheltered under the NATO umbrella. Once this objective has been achieved and under the new international context resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pakistani establishment - on the verge of financial collapse - has seen a golden opportunity for reconciliation with Washington, to the detriment of India, which is inevitably close to Moscow. .
It is worth mentioning that President Vladimir Putin, who was to receive Imran Jan on February 23 in the Kremlin, delayed the appointment by one day, to make it coincide with the beginning of the "special military operation", giving the images of the meeting a double slap to the United States, historical ally of the governments and regimes of Islamabad.
The charismatic Imran Jan, who rubbed shoulders with the cream of London during his marriage to the extremely wealthy heiress Jemima Goldsmith, is now presenting himself as the voice of the "new Pakistan" and the ordinary citizen against the establishment. His last wife no longer wears a neckline, but a veil. Although the most veiled is your program, if you have it, beyond a bunch of complaints and commonplaces.
Following the triumph of the censure motion in April, in which a lot of money apparently changed hands, Bilawal Zardari Bhutto enthusiastically exclaimed that "the old Pakistan is back". Today the son of Benazir Bhutto, after agreeing with the brother of Nawaz Sharif - the other political "dynasty" of the country - is foreign minister.
Jan's disqualification is based on the sale of some of the state gifts received during his government. Something that most Pakistanis consider peccata minuta, given the monstrous level of corruption of their political class, both at the state and provincial levels. The next stop on Jan's march was precisely Gujrat, the nerve center of Punjabi chieftaincy and servility to the dark side of the Armed and Security Forces.
Pakistan has a bitter experience of attacks against its heads or former heads of government in office or campaign. The aforementioned Benazir Bhutto, whose return to Karachi in 2007 was greeted with a bomb against her caravan leaving the airport, died a few weeks later in another attack in Rawalpindi. The difference is that then the killer was blown to pieces moments after he pulled the trigger.
"Imran Jan is the red line of Pakistan, do not dare to cross it", read this morning on the hood of a car, while the march was still tense but peaceful. Earlier this week, Jan said that "the revolution is underway" and that the only unknown is "whether it will be done peacefully through suffrage or with destruction and bloodshed." More than crossing a red line, this Thursday someone seems to have sent a last warning.
