PAKISTAN’S voters have reprimanded anti-democratic power centres for seeking to ‘cancel’ political opponents. Voters ensured that Imran Khan’s popularity increased in inverse proportion to the reported repression he and his supporters were subjected to. The voters’ emphatic rejection of threats and assorted obstacles to the polling booth counts as an uplifting sign for Pakistan’s troubled democracy. For, in its day, every political party big or small, often nudged by men in uniform, has unleashed a pattern of cancelling opponents, and Imran Khan himself is not blameless in this practice. The verdict is praiseworthy insofar as it defied the country’s demeaning culture of political intolerance. In so doing, it also snubbed media pundits who have tended to exceed their brief as the trusted eyes and ears of democracy.

Could a similar turn of events come about in India in May? There’s an overwhelming need for it, given the penchant in evidence for jailing opponents and evicting opposition MPs from parliament in a new low for the cancel culture thriving under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s watch. Modi began by calling for a Congress-free India but widened the aperture to target other opponents.

It’s unfortunate, naturally, that South Asian countries have been in the throes of the ‘cancel’ malaise for so long, rooted as it has been in the Cold War tussle that played out in the region’s young and fragile democracies. The Cold War has gone, but a new stand-off involving another set of big power rivalries continues to spur political intolerance to serve their........

© Dawn