‘Should I stop being Khawaja Asif because I’m defence minister?’ Asif defends his tweets

Following online debate over how Defence Minister Khawaja Asif manages his X account, the minister has insisted that he runs it himself “200 per cent”, dismissing the notion that holding public office means giving up his lighter side.

Speaking to Geo News’ Shahzad Iqbal, Asif was asked about the criticism that a defence minister should not post on frivolous matters, and about the memes his tweets regularly generate. He said he saw nothing wrong with it.

“Should I stop being Khawaja Asif because I’m defence minister? Should I give up my identity?” he said. “Good or bad, it is what it is. I’m 70 years old now.”

Iqbal pointed to a recent post challenging users to spot what did not belong in a 1956 photograph, to which Asif replied with a single word: “watch”. The answer, a smartwatch, drew a flood of reactions and memes online. Asif said the exchange was harmless. “They posed a riddle about what in the picture doesn’t belong to that era, and it was a smartwatch. I just wrote it. What’s so unserious about that?”

He said his public role did not change who he was. “I have a personal life, a normal life. I’m a very normal human being, there’s nothing special about me,” he said. “I have no pretensions. I don’t want to wear a cloak. I do what I am.”

Asked whether the humour was deliberate, Asif said he tended to post lighter material late at night. “Usually when I’m free, around 11 or 12, my mind starts working. The rest of the day it doesn’t,” he said, adding that the spell lasts an hour to an hour and a half, after which he goes to sleep.