Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  ‘Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night,’ the Weekly Standard wrote in a generally unadmiring May 2005 profile. The paper quoted Imran as having remarked, with some reticence, of his love life, ‘Er, by answering that question I put myself in a difficult position because this will get quoted in Pakistan. I respect my own culture and a lot of young people look up to me. It’s a big responsibility for me not to make these admissions in public. Everyone knows I’m a single man and a normal man. But there’s no need to stick it down their throats.’ To anyone mildly acquainted with the facts, Imran’s reply was a tour de force of evasion and understatement. One former lover was less discreet and later informed The Times that he ‘juggled his girlfriends extremely elegantly … and he likes mangoes’.

  By contrast, the man whose image was perpetuated by his charity fundraising was almost saintly. At the age of nine or ten, one friend assured me, Imran had ‘gone out in winter in a new overcoat and returned without it — he’d given it to a ragged urchin he had seen shivering in the cold.’ There would be a number of broadly similar tales over the next 30 years. That the Weekly Standard’s spoilt-brat view of Imran is something of a simplification we have, I hope, established. But it would still be an inadequate picture of the man to claim he was totally without his humanising contradictions. ‘In 1995, Khan denounced the West with its “fat women in miniskirts”,’ the Standard factually reported. ‘Presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts he dated were OK, then?’

  At around the time he retired from cricket, Imran met a tall, attractive, 26-year-old brunette named Kristiane Backer. She was the German-born presenter of MTV Europe, and as such based in London. Over the years, Imran had shown himself to be an attentive companion who would listen with sympathy while women talked about themselves, their lives, their jobs and even sometimes their slightly dotty New Age philosophies. Ms Backer (whose own skirts tended to be of the token variety) would later write in praise of her adopted home town, ‘It has always stood for respect (not just tolerance!) towards other cultures and religions. It has graciously welcomed its guests, black, white, yellow, green or pocadot [sic]. In fact, The Queen is proud of Great Britain’s multi-cultural heritage. David Bowie once asked to have his photograph taken with me! … I also adore Islamic art and architecture. They are always harmonious and pleasing to the eye … My extensive travels throughout the Muslim world have given me the opportunity to dig deep into the intricate cultural fabric of Muslim societies and gain a knowledge of their religion and way of life. Rich in colours, spices and scents, my experiences in the Orient, the people and their values inspired and challenged me at the same time … I also hosted many live music shows in Europe with acts like Take That, the Backstreet Boys and Lenny Kravitz.’ Imran and Kristiane Backer, who went on to qualify as a homeopath, were to be together for some two years.

  A longer-term priority was Imran’s growing concern with social justice, which also began in earnest around 1992. The obsession was startling in its sweep and boldness. Imran doesn’t seem to have proclaimed the fact: he just acted, building on a groundswell of progressive opinion within Pakistan. In its way, the transformation was almost as total as the one which had turned him in his late twenties from being a county trundler to a world-class bowler of Caribbean fire. Imran’s new constituency would be the hitherto largely silent majority of ordinary citizens whose rulers had spent some $10 billion in outstanding loans from the US government on such projects as an opulent new prime ministerial secretariat in Islamabad and a fleet of several thousand American yellow taxis, which Nawaz Sharif’s government saw fit to distribute throughout every small town and village, regardless of whether or not they had roads. With both Sharif and Benazir Bhutto coming to face corruption charges in Pakistan’s courts, Imran must have sensed that the country would be receptive to an honest, socially conscious politician who already happened to be a national hero. In the meantime, he continued to concentrate on his hospital, to which he gave his full World Cup winner’s bonus of some £85,000.

  Imran’s new calling would require a certain amount of sacrifice both from himself and those around him. As Kristiane Backer observed, ‘His working life changed so completely. The circumstances of Imran’s life altered incredibly when he [retired]. He had great plans for his country and, as Nelson Mandela said, regrettably, when your mission is the struggle there’s little time left for family.’

  * These unsubstantiated allegations of bribery and corruption at the Shaukat Khanum hospital were never levelled at Imran himself, and could only have been politically motivated had they been so.

  NINE

  ‘If They Say They Were Squeezing the Ball — Fine; They Were Squeezing the Ball’

  Imran’s eventual decision to enter the briar patch of Pakistani state politics wasn’t unprecedented for a former Test player, and his old bowling partner Sarfraz had chosen the same career path some years earlier. But it still presented rather more of a challenge than he would have faced had he slipped into the more typical retired cricketer’s world of providing occasional colour commentary on Sky Sports and opening provincial supermarkets. Crudely put, it meant asking people who were your social inferiors to vote for you. It meant entering an arena where the privileges of birth could be counter-productive. It meant being on familiar and friendly terms with every adult on the electoral roll, or at least as many as practicable, and kissing their babies. And, in Imran’s case, it meant putting himself at the mercy of a small but fanatical band of enemies from his playing days who could be expected to oppose him out of personal malice rather than high-minded conviction.

  On the upside, there was a large and potentially receptive audience waiting for him. Many Pakistanis saw in Imran a slightly more glossy reflection of themselves: he was fiercely patriotic and rightly concerned about his country mortgaging itself to the West; he was not a multimillionaire; and he wasn’t part of any establishment. His elderly father and his four sisters were all still working productively. And he exhibited, or at least projected, some of the grit and defiance of the Pathan tribesmen he had written about in two books.*

  Imran warmed up for his new role by taking an unpaid position as ‘special adviser’ to the Pakistan Board of Control. This was not the sort of job ideally suited to the nervously inclined. Imran’s tenure was punctuated by the familiar ongoing rows, mostly centred, it appears, around the question of Javed Miandad’s suitability as captain. The decision to remove Javed in early 1993 split the BCCP into two factions. Infighting was not a skill that the bureaucrats had allowed to grow rusty following Imran’s own resignation from the side. In making his ill-tempered departure, Javed accused his predecessor of being a ‘conspirator and a manipulator’ behind the scenes. Salim Malik came to echo the sentiments when he found himself omitted from Pakistan’s subsequent tour of the West Indies, allegedly on Imran’s advice.

  As the board’s representative, Imran also attended meetings of the International Cricket Council at Lord’s, where he put the case for staging the World Cup on the subcontinent again. Although the other delegates eventually fell in with the idea, not least because the Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka contingent (quite legally) got the ICC Associate Members on board by promising them £100,000 each, Imran told me, ‘I was appalled … Most of the Englishmen still treated us as though we represented some junior colony.’ He was to resign his position only a year later, amid some controversy.

  Coming back to Lahore offered the first real reward of retirement. Imran still ‘absolutely loved’ the chaotic, over-full city with its Mogul tombs and town-centre cricket stadium jostling up against a growing number of shops that were almost Parisian in their luxury. While in Pakistan he spent most of his time living in a well-heeled suburban home with his father and close family. There were also frequent excursions to the area around Mianwali, some 320 kilometres (200 miles) to the west at the foot of the Salt Range mountains. It was here that the Niazis had first settled
in the 13th century. Imran liked nothing more than to wander off into the hills with a few friends and shoot partridge, even in this remote spot often coming across groups of fanatical cricket supporters. A companion and occasional travel writer told me of a weekend trek up the banks of the Indus when a crowd of elderly tribesmen, ‘look[ing] sad, shabby and world-worn as they sat around their campfire, serenaded by jackals’, had ‘sprung to life’ on seeing Imran and then begun to pepper him with intensely technical questions about his various Test performances. ‘You could tell he was more in his element here in this tribal outpost than he was in some meeting or another with the suits at Lord’s.’

  While Imran decompressed from his 21 years in the limelight, he was arranging for construction of the cancer hospital which at last appeared to be adequately funded to become a physical entity. The site itself had little pretension to beauty. The modern, red-brick facility would rise up from a patch of scrubby wasteland, swampy in one corner, with a heavily congested road running immediately behind it. Imran did not give much attention to the building’s externals. Once inside, however, the Shaukat Khanum centre was a plate-glassed, slick-floored repository of the latest research and treatment equipment. There were airy waiting rooms with a variety of ethnic artwork on the walls, potted palms and a large reception area which was occasionally flag-strewn to give éclat to ceremonies. Many an equivalent Western hospital would be put to shame by the obvious care and attention that went into making the patient feel welcome there. Imran was clearly quite proud of the place, to which he had given some £200,000 of his own money by late 1993, even if as yet he remained its principal exhibit. As the building progressed, he liked to take potential donors through it, detailing the various amenities. Walking into the lobby, he once waved at a framed photograph someone had left on a desk showing himself sporting a luxuriant bouffant and said, ‘And there’s Mr Shampoo.’ Imran and his board took another significant step forward when, in December 1992, they appointed a new full-time hospital director: David Wood, the former chief medical officer and head of development of a 650-bed facility in Colorado, and as such a man who brought both proven fundraising and clinical skills to the job.

  If the hospital was what ‘fired Imran up to an almost messianic level’, to quote Today, it was, perhaps, because he had graphic family experience of Pakistan’s generally abject track record in providing even basic cancer care. Everything was now geared to this cause. A friend recalls that, for some two years, Imran basically did nothing but ‘raise money through a never-ending round of auctions and dinners, and travel around the country on goodwill missions’. One could tentatively conclude that what he was really doing was showing the Pakistani public how a retired Test captain could grow old gracefully. It hardly needs adding that he was treated as a sort of secular saint, at least in Lahore, where there were confirmed instances of both men and women fainting away if they saw him. Imran, it’s widely agreed, was commendably gracious to his fans. He was also human. A certain tetchiness, occasionally remarked on in English county dressing-rooms, showed itself again when an elderly beggar once approached him outside the gates of his home for a donation: he did not obtain it. It’s only fair to raise the possibility that the man’s pitch might simply have been unduly persistent, and/or ill-timed. Imran’s interviews and speeches around 1993–4 made frequent reference to his personal indifference to money, and it’s certainly true that he lived more frugally than at least one of his World Cup-winning colleagues.

  For the time being, Imran resisted the temptation of a formal entry into national politics. He did, however, accept an unpaid position as Pakistan’s first ever ambassador for tourism. This was an area hitherto under-explored in the country’s 45-year modern history. As well as announcing Imran’s new, ‘critically prestigious’ role, the Islamabad government would undertake a vigorous publicity campaign, primarily aimed at the American market, promoting Pakistan as an ‘earthly paradise’ of combined Eastern and Western charms. If lacking the comic potential of, say, Gateshead’s one-time efforts to restyle itself as the ‘Venice of the North’, this was still something of a stretch. In 1993, Pakistan was not the vacation resort of choice for most Midwesterners.

  Imran blamed the relative indifference of the global holidaymaker to date on an irrational fear of Pakistan’s cultural traditions. ‘I don’t want to go to a place where there are a lot of people, such as the south of France, where everybody knows everybody else’, he remarked. ‘Pakistan has had some bad publicity abroad because we’re branded with Muslim fundamentalism and a military dictatorship that leads people to think of suppression.’ (This particular association had, indeed, occurred to the US State Department, who put out a recurrent ‘travel advisory’ in the mid-1990s for any of its citizens planning to visit the region.) ‘Yet it is not as if you are beaten with sticks if a woman does not have her legs covered. That is a myth. Pakistanis love tourists, yet ever since the Crusades there has been this fear of Islam. It is always portrayed as an evil religion.’ Imran said this, it should be noted, some eight years before the 9/11 attacks on the American homeland.

  There was more to a public appearance by Pakistan’s new ambassador for tourism than a few scene-setting remarks and the distribution of glossy leaflets, however. Like many successful figures in politics, showbusiness, sport and elsewhere, Imran used a number of techniques for intensifying audience response. He invariably arrived late for meetings and rallies, and when crowd anticipation reached an appropriate level he would suddenly rush in, surrounded by an animated group of baggy-trousered admirers whose presence made Imran seem all the more important to any foreigners in the audience unaware of his fame as a cricketer. In later years, while on the political campaign trail, he often made dramatic entrances, preceded by bands, marching units, kite-flying children, imams and others. At Lahore, in February 1997, crowds could hear the excited screams of Imran’s entourage long before he stepped out of a shiny Range Rover to address them. Conversely, he remained the most personally unassuming figure anywhere in Pakistani public life, and still liked to walk around the streets of his home town ‘without a big fuss’, he told a reporter.

  Much of Imran’s ambassadorial work went on in London, where he put forward a variety of specific plans to enhance Pakistan’s tourism potential. Among these was a proposal to build a resort of ‘ten luxury lodges of native mud and brick’ in the foothills of Kashmir’s Karakorom range. From there, he said, visitors would be ‘conveyed with guards into the tribal areas. There would be designated areas for camping, tents with portable showers, and local cooks. It would be the ultimate [destination]. There are bears and snow leopards there and hardly anyone from outside knows about it.’ While characteristically full of enthusiasm, Imran proved himself to be not particularly well suited to the more mundane and bureaucratic aspects of his job, which inevitably involved haggling with various government ministers for funds. In 2009, the World Economic Forum Travel and Tourism Competitiviness Index put Pakistan a lowly 73rd on its list of leading holiday destinations, 18 places below India, though somewhat ahead of Zimbabwe.

  Although fiercely ambitious to advance Pakistan’s fortunes wherever he could, Imran also knew when the time was ripe for inaction. The particular political turbulence in the country from the spring to the autumn of 1993 was a good example. Nawaz Sharif’s term as premier was interrupted in April that year, when the state president used his emergency powers to dissolve parliament and appoint Balakh Sher Mazari as the caretaker prime minister. Just 38 days later, Pakistan’s Supreme Court revoked the presidential order and reinstated Sharif. He lasted in office another seven weeks before being replaced by a Washington-based, former World Bank official named Moeen Qureshi. Qureshi, too, proved to be something of an evanescent figure on the national political scene and was followed in turn by Benazir Bhutto, whose centre-left Pakistan People’s Party swept to power in legislative elections held that October. Pakistan had thus had the services of five administrations in six months. In the midst o
f this, either Mazari or Qureshi, or possibly both, had offered Imran a post in the cabinet, which he declined.

  Thanks to their fondness for building themselves offices of Babylonian opulence, and also to the economic sanctions imposed on Pakistan as a result of its nuclear programme, all of the aforementioned governments operated constantly on the verge of national bankruptcy. By mid-1995, the country was having to ‘reschedule’ its impressively large foreign debt repayments. A number of domestic groups displayed their concern at the way Pakistan was being governed by organising street demonstrations, several of which turned into riots. It would of course be wrong to claim that the protests were aimed exclusively at the profligacy of the various governments’ spending policies. There was also a certain amount of friction between, on the one hand, those who wanted Pakistan to be a democratic and progressive welfare state and, on the other, those who preferred a more narrowly religious interpretation of the 1956 constitution. The overall result was a decade of recurrent civil unrest, punctuated by regular allegations of corruption levelled against all of Pakistan’s leading politicians. It was in this climate that Imran declined to throw in his lot with any of the major established parties.