Climbdowns, Cheese And Crowdfunding: Imran Khan’s First Month As PM theguardian.com

On Monday morning, in the ramshackle suburb of Al-Asif Square in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, local headteacher Syed Mustafa was organising a party. The night before, the newly elected prime minister, Imran Khan had promised on national television to grant citizenship to the Pakistani-born children of the country’s roughly 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Mustafa set out the sweets while one of his colleagues put up a large Pakistani flag.

But the celebrations were brief. On Tuesday, after strong push-back by nationalists, the military and his own coalition partners, the prime minister U-turned. “No decision had been made” on citizenship, Khan said in a speech to parliament.

As locals sought Mustafa out to ask where they could get Pakistani ID cards for their children, it fell to the 43-year-old to inform them that the situation had changed: their children would still be shut out of access to public healthcare, schools and formal employment.