Imran Khan: The prisoner the Field Marshal cannot afford to free — or lose

There are political prisoners whom regimes fear because they are alive. There are martyrs whom regimes fear because they are dead. Imran Khan has become something far more dangerous to Pakistan’s ruling order: a man whose existence humiliates it, and whose death could indict it.

That is the trap now tightening around Field Marshal Asim Munir and the two dynastic houses that shelter beneath the military canopy — the Sharifs and the Bhutto-Zardaris.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered the seventy-three-year-old former prime minister transferred to Shifa International Hospital for medical treatment, with his own physician included on a medical board and regular family contact restored. In a normal constitutional order, none of this would qualify as “relief.” It would qualify as Tuesday.

Yet Pakistan’s rulers have spent so long converting elementary rights into privileges that a prisoner seeing a doctor now arrives with the pomp of a constitutional breakthrough.

The government’s attempt to challenge part of the ruling completes the farce. Apparently, the republic can survive managed elections, political engineering, mass prosecutions and institutional deformation — but a former prime minister being examined in a private hospital is where constitutional order must finally draw the line.

Even satire would struggle to improve on the absurdity.

But beneath the absurdity lies panic.

Khan’s imprisonment was supposed to shrink him. Remove him from rallies, television screens and political life; drown him in cases; exhaust his party; let isolation accomplish what political competition could not.

Instead, the state achieved the opposite.

It imprisoned the man and enlarged the symbol.

Every denied meeting became evidence. Every medical controversy became an accusation. Every attempt to make him invisible made him more politically present. The prison cell became a broadcasting tower.

This is the strategic nightmare confronting Munir.

A healthy captive can be contained. A visibly deteriorating captive becomes an indictment. A dead captive becomes history.

And history is far less obedient than parliament.

Trump’s “favorite field marshal” may be celebrated abroad as a useful interlocutor, photographed with presidents, praised in diplomatic rooms and treated as the indispensable manager of a troublesome nuclear state. But the theatrical grandeur abroad only sharpens the weakness at home. Power that must incarcerate its principal political rival for years is not demonstrating confidence. It is confessing fear.

The medals get grander as the political imagination gets smaller.

Release Khan, and he emerges not as the politician who entered prison but as the politician prison manufactured: older, wounded, mythologized, and equipped with the most devastating argument available in mass politics — that the entire coercive architecture of the state was required to keep one man away from the electorate.

Keep him imprisoned while his health visibly declines, and every courtroom technicality begins to rot into a simpler question: what sort of governing order is so frightened of one politician that doctors, family visits and phone calls must themselves become instruments of control?

And if Khan dies in custody, the problem ceases to be political management and becomes political combustion.

Death is an editor without mercy.

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A living politician can be contradicted, criticized, mocked, blamed and defeated. A dead political prisoner is stripped of complication by memory. Files vanish. Charges blur. Procedural arguments evaporate. What remains is the image: a former prime minister dying after years in state custody while supporters demanded adequate medical care.

Good luck putting the establishment’s footnotes on a protest banner.

This is precisely why Munir has reason to fear Khan alive and dead.

Alive, Khan remains a political challenger with mass recognition. Dead, he risks becoming something infinitely more difficult to contain: a permanent moral accusation.

And here the House of Sharif and the House of Bhutto-Zardari deserve no exemption.

They cannot indefinitely perform the role of distressed constitutionalists while enjoying the architecture that excludes their principal rival. Their predicament is almost comic in its cynicism. They invoke democracy while participating in a political order whose stability depends on the neutralization of the country’s most formidable opposition figure. They speak of civilian supremacy while governing under the long shadow of Rawalpindi. They inherit party names like hereditary estates, then wonder why the public increasingly regards electoral politics as feudal theatre with ballot papers.

The Sharifs want power without the embarrassment of admitting who guarantees it. The Bhutto-Zardaris want democratic mythology without the inconvenience of democratic risk.

Both houses have become political subcontractors in a system they periodically condemn and repeatedly inhabit.

That is why the Supreme Court’s order is more than a medical intervention. It exposes the grotesque poverty of a system in which basic rights now appear revolutionary because degradation has been normalized.

A confident state does not fear an ophthalmologist.

A confident government does not litigate against a family visit.

A confident military establishment does not require prisons, prosecutions, information controls and dynastic civilian auxiliaries to manage one seventy-three-year-old opponent.

Munir may command the army. The Sharifs may possess ministries. The Bhutto-Zardaris may occupy their ancestral corners of the state. Together they possess offices, institutions, networks and coercive power.

Khan possesses something they cannot manufacture by notification, amendment or appointment: political meaning.

Keep him alive, and that meaning challenges them.

Release him, and it may return to the streets.

Let him die, and it may outlive them all.

That is not supremacy.

It is entrapment.

The Generalissimo of Rawalpindi has acquired a prisoner he cannot comfortably free, cannot safely break and cannot afford to lose.

And the dynasties standing beside him should understand the same terrible fact:

when a state becomes terrified of both a man’s heartbeat and its absence, the prisoner is no longer the weakest figure in the room.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.