Imran Khan, the Pakistan cricket legend turned reforming politician, languishes in solitary confinement in the country's most notorious jail. “They've barred TV channels from saying his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture”, says Osman Samiuddin on Equator.
“There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan,” says Samiuddin. That holds even now, two years into “the state's attempts to erase him from public life”, much to the chagrin of the ruling authorities in Islamabad. The former Pakistani team captain has even been “scrubbed” from footage of his greatest sporting triumphs, including Pakistan's 1992 World Cup victory.
Imran Khan's enduring appeal
An authoritarian government trying “to vanish” a popular political leader is hardly an unfamiliar tale. But Imran Khan is deemed particularly dangerous by Pakistan's dominant military establishment, which has attempted to ban his PTI party, because of his extraordinary powers of rhetoric and ability to draw “a visceral energy from the crowd”.
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Imran Khan's premiership – which began in 2018 and ended, as every tenure preceding it has, prematurely in 2022 – “was neither as successful nor as long-lasting as his captaincy”. Yet private political discourse in Pakistan is still imbued with “Imranisms”. Indeed, “one constitutional expert put it to me that Imran's ability to infuse words with new meanings embodied the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein”.
Pakistan's “de facto ruler”, field marshal Asim Munir – who was Imran Khan's top spymaster before being removed in 2019 – understands this pulling power all too well, says the Financial Times.
Khan, who is serving concurrent sentences for offences ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets, believes Munir's strategy is to kill him “slowly”. Last November, rumours spread he'd succeeded when Khan, 73, went unseen for so long that many concluded he'd died. Pakistani officials deny wrongdoing and blame his family and supporters for “politicising” his imprisonment “to destabilise the country”.
From cricket to political office
Imran Khan made his international cricket debut as a teenager in 1971 before heading to Keble College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, says The Observer. After a career spanning two decades, he is still considered one of cricket's all-time greats. After the 1992 World Cup, Imran Khan retired from cricket and raised millions of dollars to fund a cancer hospital in his mother's memory. “That foray into philanthropy spawned his career in politics,” says the BBC. He launched Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) which means “Movement for Justice” in 1996, but it wasn't until 2011 that PTI emerged as a serious political contender.
After taking office in 2018, Imran Khan struggled to maintain his promise to be a “change” candidate. “Inflation soared, the rupee plummeted and Pakistan became crippled by debt, stoking anger and criticism that he had mishandled the economy.” He had to arrange a $6 billion rescue bailout from the IMF over a balance-of-payments crisis in 2019, before losing a vote of no confidence in 2022. There followed a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities before he was seized, in dramatic circumstances, at an Islamabad High Court hearing in May 2023, says The New York Times. His arrest sparked riots across the country.
“Let there be anarchy, let there be chaos,” one supporter told the BBC. “If there is no Imran, there's nothing left in Pakistan.” Yet, short of revolution, the chances of his release are slight. Khan faces “an elaborate buffet” of charges “so numerous that even his own legal team has lost track of exactly how many there are”, says The New York Times. Still, pressure is mounting. Last month, his son, Kasim Khan, addressed the UN, detailing his father's “deliberate persecution” in a moving speech. There was “a familiar determination” in his eyes.
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