IK, PTI remain unrepentant & still think they did nothing wrong on May 9
The events of the past 20 days or so, especially those of the past 10 days, strongly suggest that Imran Khan, those still with him and by and large his hardcore supporters (‘youthias’ as they have come to be called), remain unrepentant about the events of May 9.
They think they did nothing wrong. Many senior leaders, even those who held press conferences, who have publicly said that the May 9 violence was wrong quality that by saying “whoever carried it out”, thereby absolving their own party and its supporters of any involvement.
They think they had a right to attack military installations and do the kind of damage to the Pakistan military which even India wouldn’t even think of doing in its wildest fantasies.
They are persisting with their propaganda, spread first and foremost by Imran Khan, that the violence was stage-managed by the agencies.
By and large, the hardcore PTI supporters, notwithstanding the daily desertions of of the party by legislators, believe this propaganda, despite abundant documentary evidence proving that the violence was in fact planned and carried out by the PTI leadership and workers. See this excellent investigative piece by The Nation into unearthing the identity of the individual who first approached the gates of Jinnah House in Lahore on May 9 — he is a hardcore PTI supporter and not an agencies’ plant.
Several PTI leaders who are on the run and in hiding remain active on social media, especially Twitter, spreading IK’s and the party’s disinformation narrative. These include the likes of Hammad Azhar, Murad Saeed, Farrukh Habib, Zulfi Bukhari, and propagandists based overseas like Adil Raja, Wajahat S Khan, Haider Mehdi and others. They have approached MPs of foreign parliaments as well as governments to try and intervene to save Imran Khan and his party, something that in the past the PTI itself would equate with ghaddari. Ironically, Imran Khan’s whole narrative on his ouster was linked to a conspiracy hatched by a senior US government official and now he seems to be literally begging for phone time and Zoom meetings with members of the US Congress.
In all of this, the objective, like before is not ‘haqeeqi azadi’ (true freedom) but varies from trying to get him back into power (looking like a very faint possibility now), to holding election (also a remote possibility for now) to easing some of the pressure being applied on his party and its leadership.
In conclusion, the general feeling that they did nothing wrong, coupled with the disinformation still being peddled that the military itself is behind the May 9 violence and the continuous appeals to foreign parliaments, governments and international human rights bodies strongly suggests that Imran Khan and his party have not accepted any responsibility for the attacks, least of all expressed any remorse.
In this regard, Imran Khan’s remarks right before his release to the Supreme Court on May 10 were reflective of his complete lack of remorse - when the CJP asked him to condemn the violence, he said that he didn’t know what was going on since he was in detention all that time.