Jemima Khan, the estranged wife of Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, has recalled some of her bitter experiences in the Islamic nation where religion is 'used to justify political attacks.'
Jemima, remembering some of her 'not-so-happy' experiences in Pakistan, said that during the 1997 election campaign, the outspoken Imran was widely accused of being part of a Zionist conspiracy because of his marriage to a person 'with a Jewish father and Jewish maiden name.'
'My then-husband had an untarnished political record, but a wife with a Jewish father and a Jewish maiden name was his Achilles heel,' Jemima noted.
The high-profile British socialite recalled that during the 2004 election campaign she had said in an interview that she had studied Salman Rushdie's book Shame for her University thesis on post-colonial literature.
'A mob of crazed (and politicised) mullahs allied to the party created by Pervez Musharraf, the PML-Q, insisted that this admission was tantamount to apostasy, that my citizenship be revoked and that I be thrown out of the country. They took out full-page newspaper ads, inciting people to riot outside our home,' Jemima said in an article in the Sunday Telegraph of London.
Jemima said that in 1998 she was also falsely accused by Nawaz Sharif's government of smuggling antiques -- a non-bailable offence.
'I am afraid I scampered before I could be arrested and only returned to Pakistan six months later, once there had been a military coup and the charges against me had been dropped,' she mockingly recalled in the article.
She said that earlier in 1997 Benazir Bhutto had alluded to the claims of Imran being a part of Zionist conspiracy on national television.
'A bogus cheque for £40 million, supposedly from my father to fund Imran's campaign, appeared in all the Pakistani newspapers. The fact that he failed to win a single seat, partly thanks to the smear campaign, put paid to the accusation,' she wrote, adding, 'religion has often been used in Muslim countries for political ends.'
Jemima was in the forefront in protests in Britain demanding the ending of emergency rule in Pakistan. She also demanded the release of Imran after he was arrested but managed to escape from his home near Islamabad and went into hiding in Lahore after the emergency was imposed on November 3.
More from rediff