By Abdul Rehman Patel
Socrates was never accused of raising an army, plotting a coup or shaking Athens with weapons. His supposed crime was far subtler and far more dangerous: he taught young people how to think. For every ruling order in every age, this has always been the subversion that frightens power the most. Swords threaten for a moment, but questions unsettle a society forever. When the court confronted him, it offered two exits. He could renounce his ideas, publicly apologize and accept silence as the price of safety — or he could drink the cup of poison. On the surface, this was a legal verdict. In truth, it was a crossroads for history. Socrates understood something simple and terrifying: his body could survive an act of surrender, but his conscience would not.
Therefore, he chose the hemlock. The state killed the man, but it could not kill the idea. On that day, Socrates did not simply die; something larger was born — the enduring idea that conscience is worth more than comfort. Power has always feared truth for exactly this reason. Truth breeds questions. Questions breed awareness. Awareness makes obedience impossible. So, every age invents its own methods for silencing its Socrates: sometimes with poison, sometimes with prison, sometimes with character assassination, sometimes with a slower and more invisible suffocation. The method changes; the instinct does not. Centuries later, the same confrontation re-emerged, shaped by a different geography and a different political order. Imran Khan’s greatest “crime” — in the eyes of those who wished to weaken him — was not his governance.
It was that he reminded ordinary people that they were not subjects but citizens. Like Socrates, he was quietly offered the conventional exits: retreat, negotiate, soften your stance, and the pressure will fade. But some figures are not designed for the comfort of compromise. They are shaped instead by the moments that test them. At that defining moment, Imran Khan collapsed every offer of safety into two words that have already become part of the political memory of this era: Absolutely Not. A political decision turned, in that instant, into an ethical boundary. It was no longer about statecraft; it became a refusal to bow. Then came the consequences. The months after 2023 bled into the long shadows of 2024 with wave after wave of arrests.
Court cases multiplied. Party leaders fractured under pressure. Workers were picked up or forced underground. Streets filled again with protests that carried both anger and defiance. November still hangs heavily in memory — protests surging across cities, crowds chanting through clouds of uncertainty, and then the sudden eruption of gunfire. It cut through the shouting and the slogans, marking a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between authority and resistance. Bodies fell, but the deeper wound was to the political psyche of the country. Today, the story has entered a darker and more intimate phase. Imran Khan sits in solitary confinement, where days bleed into nights and silence becomes a weapon. His family waits outside closed doors, denied even the most basic human contact.
The cell is a kind of poison administered slowly — not in one fatal cup but in a hundred small doses over months and perhaps years. It attacks not the body alone but the mind, through isolation, through absence, through the slow grinding of time. Socrates faced poison; Imran Khan faces solitude. The poison ended life swiftly; solitude erodes it inch by inch. Socrates had a final hour; Khan is confronted with an uncertainty that stretches into a void. Yet across these differences, the charge remains the same: refusal to yield. History teaches that physical death is not the real threat. The true death begins when a person retreats from themselves.
If Socrates had apologized, he might have lived — but philosophy would have lost one of its foundations. If Imran Khan were to compromise, he might walk free — but he would fade from the moral imagination of those who look to him for courage. Comfort preserves bodies; suffering creates symbols. Most lives pass quietly. A few pass through fire and leave a mark on history. Socrates taught the youth to question. Imran Khan taught the youth to reject injustice. Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Khan distilled that philosophy into a single civic refusal. The vocabulary has changed. The political order has changed. The century has changed. Nevertheless, the confrontation — between truth and power, between conscience and coercion — has not.
(The Pakistani-origin American writer and columnist, sheds light on various social and political issues, can be reached at news@metro-morning.com)
