Salman Rushdie, an author and Booker Prize winner born in India, was stabbed, and according to Imran Khan, a former prime minister, the attack was not justified despite Muslim rage toward the author being understandable. This was reported by the Guardian on Friday.
Imran commented to the newspaper about the brutal attack that put Rushdie on a ventilator, saying, “I think it is terrible, sad.”
“Rushdie was able to comprehend because his family was Muslim. He is aware of the adoration, awe, and respect for a prophet that resides in our hearts. He was aware of that. I could understand the anger, but you can’t excuse what happened “The newspaper cited the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) as saying.
Rushdie, who spent nine years hiding under the protection of the British police and was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, has lived with a bounty on his head.
According to his agent, the author suffered severe injuries in the attack, including liver injuries, nerve damage in his arm, and the potential loss of an eye. But since the weekend, his condition has been getting better, and he was taken off the ventilator.
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Political exploitation
Imran also discussed the PTI’s political persecution, focusing in particular on the alleged mistreatment of Shahbaz Gill, a fellow party leader who was detained earlier this month on suspicion of sedition and who Imran claimed had been beaten and “psychologically broken.”
According to the British newspaper, “Gill was targeted because he had said army officers should not obey unlawful commands.”
The former prime minister complained, “They are forcing him to say that I was the one who told him to say that.”
He claimed that what they were doing to Gill was a message to everyone. “And they’ve frightened our employees. Social media activists have gained attention, and ours is a very active platform. They are attempting to intimidate the populace.
We never attempted to repress the media during my time. The only issue was that security agencies occasionally picked up people, which we learned about three or four times before we had them released, according to the Guardian.
Speaking of the Afghan Taliban government that took over in August of last year, the PTI chief predicted that “Afghan women and the Afghan people will eventually assert their rights.” They are tough individuals.
But if you push the Taliban from the outside, they will just put up defenses because you don’t know how they think. They simply detest outside intrusion, he continued.
The attack on Salman Rushdie is very sad and condemnable, it cannot be justified in any way. Imran Khan’s interview to the American magazine The Guardian.
Khan attributed the excesses and disappearances to the security forces counterinsurgency strategies.
Although they claimed to be involved in the insurgency that was raging in Balochistan and the tribal region bordering Afghanistan, they were in charge of picking up people. Since you couldn’t convict terrorists in court because you wouldn’t get witnesses, they would therefore blame that, with some justification, Khan said.
We never attempted to repress the media during my time. The only issue was that occasionally, the… security agencies picked up someone, which we learned about three or four times before we had them released, he said.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a group that promotes a free press, described Khan’s government’s abuses as “endless.” However, it also mentioned a fresh campaign to terrorize journalists who publish critical stories.
Since Khan was replaced as prime minister by Sharif, there has been no decrease in the harassment of journalists, according to a statement from RSF.
The nation’s election commission is also pursuing a case against Khan and the PTI for illegitimate foreign campaign contributions. While he didn’t refute the accusations, he dismissed them as politically motivated and noted that rival organizations, like Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), had not been subject to the same level of scrutiny.
Akbar Babar, one of the PTI’s original members, filed a lawsuit against the group in November 2014, alleging irregularities in the handling of about $3 million in foreign funding. The Pakistan Election Commission declared last month that the PTI had received illegal funding. Khan was called before the commission on Tuesday, and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has been given a new investigation task. According to experts, if the accusations against Khan are proven, his party or career in politics may be banned.
By claiming that the US had assisted in convincing members of his party to defect, Khan accused Washington of orchestrating the vote of no confidence that toppled his government.
He has also laid the blame at the feet of Pakistan’s military, which has long presided as the country’s political kingmaker. In his interview with the Guardian, he was more cautious in accusing the security forces, but he still stated: “If they weren’t behind the conspiracy, they could have stopped it because the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] and MI [Military Intelligence], which are international-quality intelligence agencies, would have known what was going on.”