Army brat to Pakistan’s ‘anti-establishment’ face: Who is Omar Ayub Khan?
Al Jazeera
His grandfather led Pakistan’s first military coup. Is PTI’s Omar Ayub Khan the democracy champion his country needs?
Islamabad, Pakistan – Moments after Pakistan’s newly-elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif concluded his victory speech amid a ruckus in parliament, Omar Ayub Khan got up to address the house from the opposition benches.
Posters of Imran Khan, the chairman of Omar’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and a former Pakistani prime minister, were pasted on his desk and on those of his colleagues.
Wearing a red-and-green scarf, the colours of his PTI, 54-year-old Omar invoked a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is something rotten in the system of Pakistan today.”
According to Imran Khan, what is rotten is the role of Pakistan’s military establishment – which the former cricket captain-turned-politician accused of interfering in the country’s politics to remove him from power in 2022, a charge the army denies.
Omar, otherwise a keen adventure sports enthusiast with a passion for aviation and skydiving, has been far more circumspect, training his guns on the political parties that have combined to form the government: Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and other smaller parties.
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