Sunday Times 2
The world watches legendary Khan in jail
View(s):To be the sporting idol adored by millions in a nation is a rare achievement in our times. To be a leader of a nation on whose behalf tens of thousands of his followers risk their lives armed with only sticks and stones, defying the armed forces of a ruling authority is also a rare national achievement but to be imprisoned under horrifying conditions after all that — escaping assassination attempts — is an experience of many historic world leaders.
Imran Khan, the captain of the Pakistan cricket team that defeated England to win the World Cup finals in 1992 for the first and only time — so far — and later became the prime minister of his country and being thrown into jail last week went through all that in his 70 years.
He was found guilty by the court of corrupt practices regarding gifts made to the state, a charge which Khan strongly denied and his lawyers say were not given an opportunity to defend.
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan eaves after appearing in the Supreme Court in Islamabad on July 26, 2023
Another grim irony is that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is the brother of Nawaz Sharif who is still the president of the Muslim League (PML-N) and was imprisoned by the courts after the exposure of the Panama papers that showed the extent to which money had been laundered by this all-powerful politician.
Nawaz Sharif is now in an Intensive Care hospital in London but remains the president of the party. On December 19, Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau froze 23 accounts of Shehbaz Sharif for money laundering and he was incarcerated pending trial and released on bail in April 2022. He was appointed prime minister after Imran Khan’s government was defeated on a no-confidence motion.
With Imran Khan jailed and banned from politics for five years, Shehbaz Sharif wrote to President Arif Alvi calling for the dissolution of the National State Assembly. The dissolution marks the end of the five years which began with the regime of Imran Khan.
The dissolution will result in an interim government to oversee the next general elections within 90 days or earlier. However, the government approved the results of a digital census last week. According to Pakistani law, the census results determine the boundaries of the constituencies.
IT will take at least four months to redraw the constituencies and observers rule out holding polls in 2023.
Meanwhile, Imran Khan has been moved to a prison 50km away from Islamabad, his lawyers have said. This time his arrest has not sparked violence from his supporters as it did during his arrests in May. Khan has maintained that his advice to voters has always been not to indulge in violence. But the authorities have said that his supporters had even attacked army establishments, the army in Pakistan being considered something sacrosanct and vital for national security although it is neck deep in politics.
Imran Khan’s conduct is considered to have contributed to the existing chaotic state of the country. His intransigence and refusal to cooperate with other opposition parties were destructive to a country in a deep financial crisis and trying to maintain even a semblance of the democratic process, critics say. Khan defended himself brilliantly in BBC’s Hardtalk with Stephen Saccur last week when he said that cooperation with the existing opposition parties meant cooperation with corrupt leaders found guilty of money laundering. Moves to send him to prison, he said, was a move to prevent him from contesting the scheduled election.
While allies who joined him in a constituent government deserted his party under pressure from the forces and some of his own supporters left him after the collapse of his government. Western media reports say that he still remains the most popular politician.
Can he make a comeback as he did in cricket with his swinging thunderbolts that rattled the stumps of many a great batsman of his day?
Khan had cricketing blood in his veins. Two of his uncles had captained Pakistan. Educated at elite schools in Lahore and in England when his father, a civil engineer settled in England, he entered the Oxford University and played cricket for the Oxford Blues team while also playing cricket for Worcester County and Pakistan.
He graduated from Oxford with a degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) and became an outstanding cricketer for his country. In 1998, when Pakistan failed to enter the quarter-finals of the World Cup he wanted to step down from captaincy but President Zia ul Haq persuaded him to carry on and prepare for the 1992 world cup, reports said. It was in this period that his team shone, performing remarkably well against leading cricketing sides such as the Windies, England and Australia.
The 1992 victory for this coveted trophy by Pakistan had the stamp of Imran Khan all over it and made him a national icon at home. He was also considered to be a cricketing great among the giants of his day. His credentials as one of the fastest bowlers became established when he finished third at 139.7 kmph in 1978 behind Jeff Thompson and Michael Holding but ahead of Dennis Lilee, Garth Le Roux, and Andy Roberts. His batting average and strike rates were better than Richard Hadlee and Michael Holding.
Basking in his cricket glory, he developed the image of a playboy, dating well-known Hollywood stars and marrying the daughter of one of the richest men in Britain.
With time, he dropped out of this playboy image and relaxed into Sufi mysticism, becoming a philanthropist and creating an ultra-modern cancer clinic in memory of his mother who died of cancer.
He then opted for radical politics being critical of the Pakistani elite for being in touch with reality and formed his own party Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in 1996, but the party failed to win any seats in elections that year. In the next election, it won one seat. He joined other groups opposing President Musharaff’s military rule. Khan’s populist politics found support among young people. He called for economic equality and opposed Pakistan’s government’s cooperation with the United States in fighting militants on the Afghan border. He opposed Pakistan being westernised and being out of touch with its religious and cultural norms.
By 2013, opinion polls showed him to be the most popular politician in the country but in the 2013 elections, his party won less than half the number of seats won by the PML-N of Nawaz Shariif. Khan attributed this to vote rigging.
Meanwhile, the geopolitics of Pakistan and India had somersaulted within three decades. Pakistan which was the only South Asian country to join SEATO and supported the United States to help defeat the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan with the help of the Mujahideen, like Osama Bin Laden, now finds itself being opposed by the United States because of strong China-Pakistan links.
India with its so-called non-alignment was then aligned with the Soviet Union and covertly against the United States but is now a military ally of the US through the Quad, the defence alliance against China.
Pakistan’s military has always been pro-US and Imran Khan maintains his allegation that the US had engineered his downfall which the US strongly denies.
The world watches the flamboyant maverick in jail with his supporters still expressing confidence in his return.
(The writer is a former editor of The Sunday Island, The Island and consultant editor of the Sunday Leader, He can be contacted at gamma.weerakoon@gmail.com)