BEWARE the Ides of March, says the soothsayer prophetically to Julius Caesar. In the next scene the Roman king is assassinated.

Regardless of the accurate call made by the oracle — and Shakespeare’s plays are stuffed with them — there is reason to feel more troubled by the pervasive role that soothsayers have come to play in contemporary politics, more so in South Asian politics.

It doesn’t matter whether they can predict the future or not. I would rather go with the king who dismissed his night guard, though he saved the king’s life by seeing a few accurate dreams about the arriving attempts on his life. The watchman’s job was to stay awake on vigil and not go off to sleep, argued the king before the beheading.

Similarly, the ruler’s job in a democracy should be to follow popular mandates, not to pursue divine predictions.

More worrying is the fact that in fragile democracies as ours, the people’s verdict can and is often subverted by the elected leader’s vulnerability to self-styled spiritual guides and clairvoyants.

Indira Gandhi was a fairly reasonable person before she fell prey to Dharmendra Brahmachari, a yoga guru who became her spiritual guide of sorts. He was indicted for transgressions during her emergency rule. Special prayers or yagnas conducted by Chandraswami, a clairvoyant guru named in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, guided P.V. Narasimha Rao.

Few had the kind of access to the prime minister’s house as did Chandraswami. Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalists slammed Sirimavo Bandaranaike when she flew to be blessed by the late Indian guru Sathya Saibaba. His prediction that her crippled toes would heal came to naught and heaped more humiliation on her from political adversaries.

Former Bangladesh military dictator H.M. Ershad was preparing to visit the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti for the second day in a row when I found him in the hotel lobby in Ajmer. I put him in a tonga to the Mayo Girls’ School where he was greeted warmly by the staff and students alike.

I had reasoned with Ershad that the Khwaja was probably not going to change his decision by a second visit. If he deserved a boon it should come anyway.

There are people who believe the India-Pakistan Agra summit ended in a political setback for Gen Musharraf because he didn’t visit the sacred shrine in Ajmer. There are those that believe Lal Kishan Advani torpedoed the summit in keeping with his right-wing Hindu credentials. The call is yours to make.

In any case, since Gen Musharraf did get to visit Ajmer eventually it would be worth finding out if he has secured a better boon than Ershad has been blessed with.

I had hardly finished reading the first chapter of Imran Khan’s autobiography when I heard Fatima Bhutto at the Jaipur Lit Fest. She trashed his alleged anti-women’s politics and mauled his proximity to the military. The book of course makes the former cricket hero-turned-Pakistan’s new political star look more agreeable than his numerous critics would allow for.

There are many things to commend about Imran Khan’s politics, foremost being his firmly anti-colonial worldview. But then he also wears the pontiff’s hat and there are too many sermons, rational and irrational, that militate against his youthful exuberance.

For one, I was surprised that Imran Khan with his excellent grasp of history and reason leaned on oracle-like figures who divined his fate on several occasions.

That they called correctly is immaterial. The question is would you fly with a pilot who checks his console before the takeoff or the one who closes his eyes and moves his hands slowly to try to join the tips of his index fingers? The outcome of the common ritual would determine if he is going to get it right.

“The first man I met was not exactly a guide but the encounter, and what he told me, so astonished me that it led to my next encounter as I became more open to the ideas these extraordinary men introduced me to,” wrote Imran.

He links his experience with the “extraordinary” men to his faith but he fails to clarify how they were in anyway dissimilar to the clairvoyants (including the one described by T.S. Eliot!) and spiritual men who guided or accosted people of other faiths, in other faiths.

In 1987, after announcing his retirement from cricket, Imran Khan met Baba Chala in a little village 100 miles north of Lahore. The Baba told him that his cricketing journey was not over. Imran smiled when Gen Zia invited him to lead Pakistan again, which climaxed in the 1992 World Cup victory.

Then there was Mian Bashir who died in 2005. It happened around 1988 when “I came across someone who would become the single most powerful spiritual influence on me and completely change my direction in life”.

Mian Bashir of course took no money from his new protégé for seeing his future and seems to have only cared for his welfare in a selfless way. “He never asked me for a thing and would say that any religious person who charged people money was a quack.”

It is hard to write off anyone’s faith as an expression of any documented irrational streak. But it is probably not unwise to question the interference of oracles in matters of state and it is this that remains an issue of concern in Imran Khan’s case.

On the one hand he is brimming with self-confidence, describing how winning the World Cup under severe pressure trained him to not wilt before adversities in politics. On the other hand, he proffers fatalistic parables for individual success.

“Our best defence came from the left-wing media in the UK, such as The Guardian and The Independent. Unlike real liberals such as the British-Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali, the left-wing media and intelligentsia in Pakistan failed to take a stand against the human rights abuses of the ‘war on terror’.” Imran Khan is so astute on this and other issues that he could be describing a universal failure of the left. But he won’t know it till some soothsayer whispers it to him.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com