Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  ‘Most fellows who join us [in the National Assembly] either do rather well for themselves or face a sticky end,’ Benazir Bhutto remarked in a 2007 overview of Pakistani politics, from which she was again in exile. It was the peculiar tragedy of her life that Bhutto herself came to exemplify both these facts. With certain rare exceptions, Imran professed complete disinterest in his own safety, refused to wear a bullet-proof vest and travelled around the country without security, often at the wheel of an open jeep.

  On a more routine note, there were also questions about whether he was temperamentally suited to the job in the first place. Imran was serious, and seemed to calculate everything; Pakistanis tend not to want their leaders to be calculators. He was stiff with people, and could be brusque. One friend assured me that Imran was riotous company in private, but agreed that he could be ‘an acquired taste … He wasn’t one to submit to such campaign stupidities as wearing funny hats or driving around the streets in a psychedelic bus.’ One of the Vahidys’ shooting party adds, ‘I saw kids come up to Imran when we were in the hills together, and he would sort of brush them off. That was more than 10 years ago, and I’m sure he’s improved with time. But let’s just say he’s not one of life’s natural baby kissers.’

  Even so, 21 years in Pakistani representative cricket, 10 of them as his nation’s captain, had given Imran a thorough grounding in administrative wrangling. After dealing with the likes of Rafi Naseem and his colleagues at the BCCP, he had little to fear in Islamabad. For obvious reasons, there was also a popular groundswell of support for an Imran candidacy, along with a matching degree of hero-worship among the Lahore press. One 1997 profile simply entitled ‘SuperKhan’ read much like a cross between Father Alban Butler’s Life of St Francis and an authorised hagiography of Che Guevara. The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom that Pakistani public life needed ‘cleaning up’, and added that the ‘redeemer of our fortunes on the sports field’ was the man to do it.

  Imran’s steady radicalisation had come about in several phases. As mentioned, he appears to have been singularly taken by the Balochi warlord Sher Mohammad Marri, whom he met in London in 1984. (The so-called ‘Balochi Tiger’ had subsequently fallen out with many of his partisans and died alone, in Indian exile, in 1993.) Ten years later, Imran’s nationwide hospital fundraiser had first brought home to him the dire financial inequities and out-and-out feudalism of Pakistani rural life. ‘I realised then we needed economic policies to help the bottom 40 per cent of society and not the top one or two per cent,’ he told me. Here, too, a degree of social anxiety was an important driving force. Identification, perhaps over-identification, with the Pakistani nation gave almost all the leading figures in the state assembly, whatever their background, a sense of pride and belonging, and an object for commitment and mobilisation. Imran was no exception. In later years he was to exhibit some flexibility in his views on multilateral disarmament by continuing to support Pakistan’s independent nuclear deterrent (a programme which, according to some estimates, had cost the taxpayer the equivalent of $7 billion between 1976 and 1998), largely as a bulwark against India. In time he was also able to tap into a fashionable, if not entirely unjustified vein of anti-Americanism. ‘I look at the US, which has 35 per cent of the world’s resources and 4 per cent of the world’s population — it’s sickening,’ Imran told The Times in 2006. ‘Some people cannot ever have enough material possessions. It’s a disturbing way to live your life.’

  According to several sources, Imran was also drawn to the charismatic figure of Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the 60-year-old former head of the Pakistani intelligence agency and a man known for the extremity of his views. Gul, who sported the regulation military moustache and thick black hair worn en brosse, had been a leading figure in organising the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. As such he’s credited with having at least tacitly encouraged the rise of the Taliban, and for having taken a relaxed view of their efforts to support themselves through the sale of opium and black-market weapons. Although the CIA played a full part in the same struggle, Gul subsequently became passionately anti-American, apparently because Washington reneged on its promise to provide the Afghans with further military and economic aid following the Soviet withdrawal, but also due to ‘the Pentagon and its Israeli-Zionist accomplices blocking my promotion to army chief of staff’. The general later called the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington the work of ‘renegade US Air Force elements working with the Jews’. (Gul’s name would subsequently surface in connection with the November 2008 bombings in Mumbai, which killed 173 people.) According to the Daily Times, in 2003 Gul went on to declare, ‘The Muslim world must stand united to confront the US in its so-called War on Terrorism, which is in reality a war against Muslims. Let’s destroy America wherever its troops are trapped.’ Speaking a year later, Imran in turn specifically warned the US against attacking on what he called ‘the holiest places of Islam’, while making it clear he did not condone any physical violence against any other adversary. Imran went on to note in the same interview that the US had signed a civil nuclear deal with India, ‘and on the other hand it is threatening Pakistan. This bears ample evidence of its true anti-Islam posture,’ he concluded.

  In 1996, Pakistan remained in its seemingly perpetual state of de facto civil war, or wars, between the civilian and martial rulers on one front and the liberal and religious forces on another. It was neither a democracy, nor a theocracy, nor a permanent military dictatorship. The rapidly growing population ran the gamut from primitive asceticism to decadent vulgarity (although, admittedly, the same could be said of the US). Successive governments had squandered money like a chav Lottery winner, erecting huge municipal palaces and importing gas-guzzling American cars by the thousand for rural areas where there were no roads. Pakistan’s most sustained economic growth was to be found in the ‘parallel’ or ‘alternative’ sector. This branch included a thriving black market, a large illicit drug industry, and illegal payments to politicians and government officials to ensure state contracts. Not only were such practices commonplace, but those involved in them proceeded with virtual impunity: no one had served a day in prison for tax evasion at any stage in the nation’s history, and successful prosecutions for corruption were nearly as rare. As Imran noted, ‘If one sets up in business in Pakistan, one has to make allowances in the costings for bribes. It’s everywhere … An ordinary policeman earns a basic pay of 975 rupees [roughly £60] per month, on which he is expected to maintain a family. Unless he’s corrupt, it is impossible for him to live decently.’ Broader social development indicators reflected long-standing problems in providing basic health and education services. Only a third of all Pakistani children between the ages of six and 13 attended school, a rate below that for Somalia. It was estimated in 1996 that 28 per cent of the population lived below the official poverty line, which was based on the government’s assessment of an income sufficient to provide ‘minimum life’.

  The Bhuttos had created a business dynasty that was known not only for its attempts to deregulate and liberalise the national economy, but for its in-house extravagance and brutality. In October 1996, the tribunal set up to investigate the killing of Murtaza Bhutto found that the assassination could not have taken place ‘without approval from the highest level of government’. There had been no shoot-out, as the police had claimed, but ‘a clearly co-ordinated [and] premeditated ambush’. The report concluded that the prime minister was ‘probably complicit’ in her brother’s murder. On 5 November, shortly after the tribunal’s findings were made public, Benazir Bhutto was dismissed from office by an emergency fiat of the state president. Three months later Nawaz Sharif returned to power when his Pakistan Muslim League won an impressive 91.2 per cent of the votes cast in new legislative elections. One of Sharif’s first acts in office was to push through a ‘thirteenth amendment’ to the constitution, effectively stripping the president of his authority to dissolve
parliament. A ‘fourteenth amendment’ soon followed, making it impossible for MPs to remove a sitting government by a vote of no confidence. As a result there were now no external administrative checks on the prime minister’s power. When Pakistan’s chief justice Syed Sajjad Ali Shah attempted to vacate the amendments, he too was ousted. The outgoing judge remarked that his country appeared to be in the permanent grip of ‘despotic regimes us[ing] extremists and external support to keep democracy at bay’.

  It was in this climate that Imran formally launched his Tehreek-e-Insaf (or ‘Movement for Justice’) party. There were seven founding members. Its essential platform was one of social equality allied to national self-reliance. ‘All through Pakistan history, stooges of the past and present colonial masters have led us,’ Imran’s manifesto read. ‘Their contribution has been merely to mortgage our children’s future and short change our dignity by making compromises under the guise of the much-abused supreme national interest … The party will restore the sovereign and inalienable right of the people to choose political and economic options in accordance with our social, cultural and religious values. We are [a] broad-based movement for change whose mission is to create a free society based on justice. We know that renewal is only possible if people are truly free.’

  Before long, Imran was roaming Pakistan from one end to another, shaking hands and invading tea houses, cafes, factories, farm buildings and schoolrooms. People greeted the newly declared candidate with a warmth rarely seen even in the subcontinent. An admiring observer wrote of seeing Imran ‘walk alongside a fence, hands out, his body swaying backwards so they couldn’t smother him [while] the crowd on the other side of the fence grabbed his hands and tried to pull him to them.’ There was a particular frenzy among students and young people, many of them female, whom the Tehreek-e-Insaf identified as being ‘totally alienated by the existing power structure’ — again, one has only to think of Barack Obama in 2008 to get something of the mood. Partially as a result, Imran’s party was transformed in the headlines from a lost cause into a viable challenge to the ruling elites. Having initially ignored him, his political opponents felt compelled to go on the attack. Benazir Bhutto began to mock her old Oxford contemporary as a ‘me-too’ candidate, whose core ideology amounted to ‘little more than a few greeting-card pleas for unity and world peace’. If so, they were apparently what a vociferous section of the electorate wanted to hear. An AP writer named Tony Gill followed Imran and Jemima to a rally in Lahore and described the scene there as one of ‘churning, burning humanity closing in on the glamorous couple … There were shouts of “Imran Khan Zyndabad” [“Long Live Imran”] while onlookers hurled either flowers or themselves at his feet.’

  Though not a natural orator, Jemima came to play an active part in her husband’s inaugural campaign. Gill watched admiringly as she addressed one rally in Islamabad. ‘A child placed a garland, the first of many, around her neck … “Nazuk si hai” [“She is fair”], several spectators observed, while paparazzi encircle[d] her in a cacophony of clicks and flashes. A few places away, Imran seemed to smile at all the attention his young wife was attracting.’ Nor was she there merely for her photogenic qualities. ‘Benazir Bhutto may speak the language of liberalism and look good on Larry King’s sofa,’ Jemima later wrote in a typically stinging piece in the Daily Telegraph. ‘But both her terms in office were marked by incompetence, extra-judicial killings and brazen looting of the treasury. Benazir has always cynically used her gender to manipulate: I loved her answer to David Frost when he asked her how many millions she had in her Swiss bank account. “David, I think that’s a very sexist question.” A non sequitur, but one that brought the uncomfortable line of questioning to a swift end.’

  A colleague regarded Imran and Bhutto as having ‘a love-hate relationship’, because though each basically disliked the other, each also showed an intense interest in the other and maintained an unrelenting scrutiny of the other’s activities and attitudes. That may suggest jealous and obsessive lovers; in fact, there was little love between Imran and the political establishment at any time, especially after he went into his first national campaign in 1997. By and large, the attacks on him fell into two categories: the partisan and the personal. One former Pakistani Test player contacted me in 2007 with what he promised to be a ‘sensational revelation’ about Imran. It should be noted that the source in question is not universally popular but possessed of an extraordinarily high degree of self-confidence, while being some way short of truly adept at cricket. He did, however, know Imran quite well over a number of years. The story he told me was that Diana, Princess of Wales, had visited Lahore in 1996 while in the throes of a ‘steamy affair’ with the Pakistani-born heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. Khan himself ‘wasn’t even in the country, but she came here to bone up on his family culture’. That would fit the known facts, but the player went on to say that Diana was ‘desperate to marry Hasnat Khan. When she was in Lahore she sought out Jemima [and] the two women sat up talking through the night about what it took to be the wife of a traditional minded Muslim. Later they went out to the hospital, did the sights together … Diana later admitted to the doctor’s family that she had become very close to Imran at the time. This didn’t surprise me. She was a vulnerable young woman alone in Pakistan, you remember. Imran wasn’t exactly the choirboy that the voters thought he was. He’d had dozens of affairs, some longer-lived, some shorter. And Diana had all the qualities he prized. How could you be more pukka English than that?’ Even so, it’s worth repeating that Imran’s political rivals would lose few opportunities over the years to exaggerate and exploit his reputation as a lothario, and that there is no concrete evidence that he ever strayed from his wedding vows. Many of the more lurid tales about his social life as a cricketer are, possibly, the fruits of mere gossip-mongering. Once he became a contender for the premiership, real malice came into play.

  The attacks continued on several fronts. In time Imran formed a particular mutual antipathy with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a Sindh-based party which was either a crusading force on behalf of southern Pakistan’s dispossessed or a loose-knit sectarian rabble of thugs and torturers, depending on your political perspective. In 1992, MQM’s leader and founder Altaf Hussain chose self-imposed exile in London rather than face possible trial in a case related to the murder of the outspoken Sindh scholar Hakeem Muhammed Saeed, for which nine other MQM members were sentenced to death. (All nine defendants’ convictions were later overturned on appeal.) Imran added that in his opinion some of the bad blood between the MQM and himself was ‘an extension of the old Karachi-Lahore rift. Even when I was a successful Test captain, it didn’t entirely stop.’ The MQM were later to play an active role in the ethnic riots in Karachi of May 2007 in which 47 people died and several hundred more were injured. As a result, Imran was quoted as saying that ‘the British government has shown appalling double standards. On the one hand it is fighting a war against terrorism and on the other it has given refuge to the number one terrorist of Pakistan, Mr Hussain.’ Hussain, in turn, signalled his intention to present the national assembly in Islamabad with evidence of Imran’s ‘bad character’. The case continued. In a completely separate and coincidental development, someone set off a bomb in the Shaukat Khanum hospital shortly after Imran first announced the formation of his party. Seven people died and 34 were wounded in the explosion, which some in Pakistan credited to the Indian intelligence services. Imran told me that he had narrowly missed being on the premises, as ‘I was due to show a donor around the facilities that morning, but the guy was late.’ The Khans then faced more muted, if unexpected criticism when James Goldsmith’s lawyer of some 30 years took exception to comments attributed to Jemima in which she questioned Israeli policy towards Palestine. The lawyer resigned his position, remarking that Jemima ‘no longer understands what being a Goldsmith means’.

  In the summer of 1996, a London court case arising out of the ‘ball-tampering’ issue overshadowed Imran’s attempt
s to launch himself on the political stage half a world away. The long, tragicomic saga had its roots in the Ivo Tennant biography published in 1994. In it Imran had not only admitted to having once lifted the seam, but then went on to tell both the Daily Telegraph and the Sun that he was by no means alone: ‘the biggest names in English cricket have all been at it,’ he confided. Later that spring, Imran gave a perhaps ill-advised interview to India Today in which he implied that the ball-doctoring row had been ‘blown out of all proportion’ because of his skin colour. ‘There is a lot of racism here,’ he noted. ‘How come the noise started when the West Indies and Pakistan began winning matches with their fast bowlers? Australians can get away with anything because they are white … Look at people such as Lamb and Botham making statements like: “Oh, I never thought much of him anyway and now it’s been proven he’s a cheat.” Where is this hatred coming from?’