Pakistan Government Orders the Arrest of Political Opposition Leader

Police in Pakistan have arrested opposition leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Saturday as part of a broader crackdown on Imran Khan’s former ruling  Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Qureshi, the former foreign minister of deposed Prime Minister Imran Khan, was arrested in Islamabad shortly after addressing a press conference.

The the reason for Qureshi’s arrest and incarceration was not immediately known, according to party spokesman Zulfi Bukhari.

Bukhari, on the other hand, protested his arrest on the social networking platform X, formerly known as Twitter, claiming that he was “arrested for doing a press conference and reaffirming PTI stance against all tyranny and pre-poll rigging that is currently going on in Pakistan.”

According to the Dawn newspaper, Qureshi was arrested under the Official Secrets Act in connection with a case of a missing diplomatic cable, which Khan earlier said was part of a scheme to depose him.

According to the publication, Interior Minister Sarfaraz Bugti stated that the detention had nothing to do with the press conference.
Qureshi warns of a constitutional violation

“Breaking the 90-day deadline [for the election] will be unconstitutional,” Qureshi said at the press conference. He stated that the party intended to appeal any delays to the Supreme Court.

In recent months, authorities have made several arrests targeting Khan’s party, shattering his grassroots power by collecting up thousands of his fans as well as key leaders.

Khan, a former international cricketer turned politician, was sentenced to prison earlier this month after being found guilty of graft.

The case was one of more than 200 he has faced since his ouster in a no-confidence vote in April 2022. Khan claims he has done nothing wrong.

Pakistan is scheduled to hold elections within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament last week, by November. However, there has been speculation for months that they may be postponed as the country deals with constitutional, political, and economic challenges.

The most recent national census data was finally released earlier this month, and the outgoing government stated that the election commission might take up to six months to redraw constituency borders.

The election commission announced on Thursday that new constituencies would be finalized by December 14, according to official television. Following that, the commission will set an election date. Electoral experts believe the vote might be postponed for several months, possibly until February.

Khan is forbidden from running in any election for five years, however numerous politicians, like outgoing Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his brother, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, have had convictions overturned in the past in order to make a comeback.

Sharif’s unstable coalition government, which succeeded Khan, dissolved parliament earlier this month, and a caretaker government led by little-known politician Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar was sworn in to run the country until elections.

According to political observers, if the vote does not take place within the time limit, the military may seize control of the country. In Pakistan’s 76-year history, the military has ruled for three decades.

Caretakers are typically limited to overseeing elections, but Kakar’s setup is the most powerful in Pakistani history, thanks to legislation that empowers it to make economic policy decisions. The move is apparently intended to keep a nine-month $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout agreed in June on track.

Pakistan is “on the verge of collapse” as it grapples with political upheaval, bloodshed, and what some, including former Prime Minister Imran Khan, refer to as “undeclared martial law.”

“What is happening right now is a total dismantling of our democracy,” Khan said in an interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan.

“When there is no rule of law, which is what is happening now,” he continued, “might is right.” “In Pakistan, there is an unofficial state of martial law. There will be darkness ahead. We are on the verge of darkness.”

Khan, 70, a cricketer-turned-populist politician who was deposed in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022, is at the centre of a political crisis in the 230-million-strong South Asian country.

With the help of his fans, Khan is attempting to stage a comeback in a rare public challenge to Pakistan’s massively powerful military, which has dominated the country directly or indirectly for the majority of its 75-year history.

More than 150 criminal proceedings filed against him on counts ranging from corruption to blasphemy and terrorism might jeopardise his eligibility to run for government. Khan claims the cases are politically motivated and denies any misconduct.

Khan went before a special tribunal of Pakistan’s Election panel on Tuesday, and the panel said that he would be indicted next week on allegations of openly insulting commission members last year.

He also went before another agency on charges of leaking an official secret document last year when he waved it around at a rally and claimed it was proof of a US plot to depose him. Khan has subsequently retracted his assertion, which both the White House and the Pakistani military have disputed.

The Intercept published a diplomatic cable it said it got from an unidentified source in Pakistan’s military, exposing a US State Department official encouraging the Pakistani government to use a no-confidence vote to depose the country’s then-prime leader, Imran Khan.

According to The Intercept, the cable describes the circumstances of a meeting between US State Department officials and Pakistan’s ambassador to the US on March 7, 2022.

According to the cable, during the meeting, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu told then-Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan that the US was dissatisfied with Pakistan’s neutral stance on Ukraine and that Imran Khan had visited Russia on the day it invaded Ukraine.

According to the cable, Lu then repeatedly hinted that Washington supported Imran Khan’s demise: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Prime Minister’s decision to visit Russia is being viewed as a decision by the Prime Minister.”

Otherwise, I believe the road ahead will be difficult.” Pakistani opposition groups were apparently forming a coalition for a no-confidence move against the prime minister in the months leading up to that meeting.

Later in the cable, the Pakistani ambassador expresses hope that Imran Khan’s visit hasn’t harmed the US-Pakistani relationship, to which Lu responds, “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective.”

Let us wait a few days to see if the political environment changes, which would imply that we would not have a major disagreement on this matter and that the dent would disappear fast.

Otherwise, we’ll have to face this problem head on and figure out how to deal with it.” The ambassador concludes in his final evaluation at the end of the cable that Lu commented “out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process.”

In a response to The Intercept, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated, “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be” and declined to comment on diplomatic negotiations.

In the past, the US has refuted Imran Khan’s assertions that a cable existed proving that the US pushed a vote of no-confidence.