Cipher saga

Ever since the vote of no-confidence was seen as a credible threat to his ouster from power, Imran Khan and his party had started a well-planned and politically-astute campaign regarding a ‘foreign conspiracy’ hatched by the US to get rid of him due to his ‘independent foreign policy’. Imran first mentioned this 'conspiracy' in a rally on March 27 last year, during which he revealed a 'letter' [later: cipher], without naming the US or going into the content of the letter. The name of the country was later revealed by him in a supposed slip of the tongue during an address to the nation. For months, the PTI kept repeating its ‘foreign conspiracy’ mantra: how the US and the PDM – and ‘powerful’ quarters – got together to overthrow an ‘independent’ Imran. All this despite the National Security Committee (NSC) having said there was absolutely no conspiracy by a foreign government in the ouster of Imran Khan. A previous NSC meeting, under Imran Khan as PM, had also not found conspiracy in the cipher/telegram. As with most things spun by the PTI at the time, the cipher narrative had in fact caught people's imagination quite effectively. In a country prone to believing in conspiracy theories – in some cases, probably not without reason – Imran and the PTI's theory sounded perfectly plausible to some.

Saner minds, however, had cautioned right from the beginning that the entire conspiracy was baseless and regular diplomatic communication was used by the PTI as a political gimmick. Now, even those part of the previous PTI regime are singing – and the song is pointing clearly at their political leader's cynical use of manipulation and paranoia and conspiracy theory to fool a whole people. Imran's former principal secretary Azam Khan has ‘recorded’ a statement, terming the US cipher a ‘conspiracy’ used by the former PM to create “a narrative against [the] establishment and opposition”. This is not the first time this story has surfaced. The issue had also come to light earlier when an alleged audio leak between Imran and Azam was shared on social media, with a conversation that showed that (allegedly) Imran knew there was nothing in the ‘cipher’ that could be used as a conspiracy but had decided to ‘play with it’ and made it out to be something it was not – some sort of sinister plot hatched by the US with the help of Pakistani politicians and other players.

Naturally, the PDM government is not going to let this one go and Federal Law Minister Azam Tarar has made it clear that the government has indeed decided to try PTI Chairman Imran Khan under the Official Secrets Act in the cipher case. In his statement to an Islamabad magistrate, Azam Khan had said that Imran had told him he would display the cipher in front of the public and “twist the narrative that a foreign conspiracy is being hatched in collusion with local partners and play [the] victim card”. Not only that, as it had turned out, the copy of the cipher with Imran had apparently gone 'missing' – something admitted by Imran himself too. Per legal and diplomatic experts, that is not something that should be taken lightly for obvious security reasons. While one can easily argue that Azam Khan's statements are hardly much of a revelation – analysts and political observers had been terming the cipher narrative a manipulated game for quite some time, and the story of the missing cipher had also been known for a while – it does make this information more 'official' at a time when the PTI chairman is fast running out of luck. On its part, the PTI has dismissed Azam Khan’s statement, saying they will not believe a 'missing' Azam Khan's statement until they hear him say it. Government members insist Azam Khan is not missing. Perhaps, it would be far more in the fitness of things for Azam Khan to make a more public statement. Because at the end of the day, there has to be some accountability for how one party's use of an apparently made-up narrative could have direly damaged Pakistan's foreign policy. At the time, anyone trying to find logic in this whole episode was termed traitor by the PTI and its leader. Will they now finally realize just how circular Pakistan's power karma is?