Army brat to Pakistan’s ‘anti-establishment’ face: Who is Omar Ayub Khan?

His grandfather launched Pakistan’s first military coup. Now, Omar Ayub Khan is the face of a party whose leader accuses the army of unseating him from power.

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.

“Their faces betray the fact they are unhappy. They know a theft took place,” he said in parliament, looking at the government benches. “They know the system cannot function like this. They have stolen our mandate.”

Yet the speech cemented his status as the parliamentary face of a party that appears to be relishing its stature as a force that has challenged the role of the military in Pakistan’s politics.

It is a legacy that Omar knows better