Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Having said all that, Imran and the Tehreek-e-Insaf fared particularly poorly in their first full public examination. The party failed to win a single seat out of the 207 available. By most official counts they secured between 130,000 and 160,000 votes, or approximately one per cent of the 19.3 million strong popular ballot. For purposes of comparison, this put the Tehreek-e-Insaf somewhat below the 2.2 per cent figure enjoyed by James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party at the British general election held three months later, and in danger of rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Natural Law Alliance, whose manifesto favoured a daily regime of levitation, at the same contest.

  Despite scoring a duck at the polls, Imran remained upbeat, remarking, ‘We are the fastest growing movement in Pakistan, and the most popular among young people.’ It’s true that the party’s electoral fortunes improved following the state president’s 2001 decision to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. But it was also true that the Tehreek-e-Insaf seemed to many observers to lack not only any nationwide grass-roots organisation, but also any discernible core beliefs. Imran (who had never previously voted) was only rarely willing or able to make specific policy pledges on the burning issue of the Pakistani economy. He could not avoid, of course, answering reporters’ frequent questions on the subject, which he usually did with variations of his ‘freedom’ mantra followed by slightly generic reminders that ‘We are Pakistan. We are one!’ It wasn’t enough. As one otherwise friendly profile in the Guardian later remarked, ‘Imran’s ideas and affiliations since entering politics have swerved and skidded like a rickshaw in a rainstorm.’ While he continued to denounce bribery and corruption, he remained ‘notably vague’ when it came to proposing any substantive reforms. This apparent inability to offer a detailed or even explicit agenda for change (again, possibly with its Obama parallels) was a frequent theme of both domestic and foreign press accounts of the campaign. Five years after the triumph of winning the World Cup, Imran still commanded a wide degree of personal affection bordering on hero-worship. He remained one of the few cricketers whose fame transcended the sport. But as a select list of current or former players would confirm over the years, it didn’t necessarily follow that just because you were good on the field you were destined to be successful at anything else, such as politics.*

  Imran’s electoral prospects suffered another setback just six months later, when a court in California ruled him to be the legal father of five-year-old Tyrian White. Tyrian’s mother Sita White was then living and working as a yoga instructor in Beverly Hills. In a statement issued through his lawyer, Imran asserted, ‘It’s simply not possible for me to travel the world fighting court cases in every country. My work is in politics and with my hospital in Pakistan. As I do not live in California or England, my response is to welcome Ms White to Lahore, where I would be glad to present my side of the story.’ Imran’s political opponents weren’t slow to note this latest instance of what the Pakistan Muslim League called his ‘world of moral bankruptcy [where] the smallest hanky-panky gets punished and the major adulterers like himself go scot-free’. Compounding a generally miserable summer, most of which Jemima spent back in England, James Goldsmith died on 18 July; the Khans’ friend Princess Diana was killed just over a month later.

  ‘We are facing a multi-crisis,’ Imran told an interviewer in 1998, part of a sombre world overview that struck one British critic as ‘owing something to Private Frazer, and his catchphrase “We’re doomed”, in Dad’s Army’. Imran continued: ‘Most of the major institutions have collapsed, and there is no coherent policy or way forward. What remains is a sort of mafia state that depends on bribes and pay-offs for its continued existence. There is a kind of ingrained dishonesty which has become part of the culture …’

  Imran was speaking about politics, but it was a reasonable sketch of Pakistani cricket at the tail end of the millennium. As a result of accusations that Salim Malik had offered his nation’s opponents substantial cash inducements to throw matches, and that the Pakistani board allegedly knew all about it, the government set up no fewer than three official inquiries. Imran went before one, telling Justice Malik Mohammad Qayyum that certain of his former Test colleagues had been involved in cheating and ‘nefarious financial activities’. ‘I’m sure some of the players were in on the betting,’ Imran added, before going on to recall the story of the 1990 Austral-Asia Cup Final in Sharjah. The belief that this was all an exclusively Pakistani problem remained deep-rooted, although it later emerged that two Australians, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne, had been approached by an Indian bookmaker known only as ‘John’, and had given him certain information about the weather and the state of the pitch for a consideration of £2,500 each. Salim Malik subsequently received a life ban, eventually lifted by a court in October 2008, by which time the former Essex and Pakistan batsman was 45.

  Following the 1997 election, Imran continued to stump the nation in classic whistle-stop fashion, whether from the rear platform of a train or bus, or in his specially adapted jeep. His message was simple and unrelenting: the government of Nawaz Sharif had centralised power in the hands of a few potentially or actively corrupt, American-backed cronies and ‘is borrowing money just to pay off Pakistan’s debts … There is no clear policy to get us out of this mess. We are in a complete crisis.’ Imran added that the original idea had been that he and Jemima would campaign together, ‘but I had to pull her out of politics to shield her from [the] attacks … That is when our problems began because we were spending time apart. That then exacerbates the problems of a cross-cultural marriage, and she inevitably missed her friends, family and home more than she might have.’ Throughout 1998–9, Imran spent three weeks of each month out of the home engaged in politics and charitable fundraising. Back in Lahore, Jemima was left holding the baby and eventually organising her own non-profit fashion label, which, in the words of the catalogue, ‘employ[ed] native Pakistani women to embroider western clothes with delicate eastern handiwork’. After six collections, the label closed in 2001.

  Imran’s moral ardour for Pakistani national renewal was real, but made him few friends among the established parties. In late 1997, Nawaz Sharif remarked, ‘Khan is demonstrating the desperation of a failed conspirator, whose plot to capture power with the help of his [foreign] father-in-law’s wealth and intrigues has met with a brick wall.’ The prime minister seems not to have been moved by James Goldsmith’s recent death, if he was even aware of it. Partly as a result of Sharif’s criticisms, the ‘bearded fundos’, as Jemima would term them, continued sporadically to picket the Khans’ family home in the months following the election, and to call for the expulsion of the ‘Zionists’ and ‘scum’ within. No wonder, perhaps, that when Imran happened to meet Javed Miandad at a cricket function in 1998, ‘he told me by way of personal advice to never get into politics’.

  For a start-up party with no parliamentary representation and little cash on hand in the bank, the Tehreek-e-Insaf would appear to have attracted more than its share of attention from its better endowed rivals. One knowledgeable source in Islamabad remarked that when speaking about Imran, Nawaz Sharif ‘was so imbued with fury that sometimes the skin on his face seemed to boil’. The prime minister had never been an enthusiastic fan of his nation’s most famous son, and was still known to refer to the time when he had been ‘biffed around’ by the delirious crowds waiting to greet Imran and his team on their return to Lahore airport after beating India in 1987.

  Eleven years later, events took another curious turn when Imran and his wife wandered into a shop in Islamabad one day and paid the equivalent of £450 for a boxload of 397 glazed blue bathroom-floor tiles. The vendor apparently assured them that the goods were locally manufactured and had no historical value. Some time afterwards, Jemima attempted to ship the tiles to her mother in London, with the idea that they might eventually add a colourful ethnic touch to Orme-ley Lodge. Instead, Customs officials in Lahore impounded the shipment and rapidly determined that the Khans were guilty of the
‘serious offence [of] exporting goods of paramount archaeological interest’, a crime which in theory carried a penalty under the terms of the Antiquities Act of 1975 of up to seven years in gaol, and/or a fine of 5,000 rupees (£50).

  By the time formal charges were laid in January 1999, a pregnant Jemima was safely home in England. ‘I’m afraid I scarpered before I could be arrested,’ she later revealed, adding that she had good reason to believe that had she not done so she would have given birth to her second child in a Pakistani prison. Imran was left behind to face the leisurely judicial proceedings, which seemed to him ‘to go on for ever … Because I was a national hero and so on, the government couldn’t attack me directly, so they did it by harassing my wife. To say it was politically motivated is an understatement. The whole thing was a crass abuse of power.’

  According to Imran, a receipt for the tiles in question and subsequent carbon-dating documents were duly presented to the investigating authorities. But officials countered that this was a ‘clear case of heinous smuggl[ing] of artefacts prised from their ancestral home’, which they apparently came to believe was the 100-domed Shah Jahan mosque in Thatta, Sindh, built around 1647. The pre-trial administrative wrangling went on for most of 1999, making the London High Court proceedings seem pacy by comparison, and proved an unwelcome distraction to a man already stretched by the demands of his hospital and his nationwide political campaigning. Imran’s ‘forced labour’, as he referred to it, was made particularly burdensome by various writs threatening his wife with summary arrest should she ever again set foot in Pakistan. ‘Nawaz Sharif wanted her locked up. It was ludicrous. She would never have faced a fair trial,’ Imran remarked. On 12 October 1999, the prime minister fell from power in a largely improvised coup led by the army chief of staff Pervez Musharraf. Some three weeks later, Jemima voluntarily returned to Pakistan. ‘Under the military rule, we fear no victimisation,’ Imran announced, a shade prematurely, perhaps, in the light of longer-term developments, as his veiled wife stood at his side. On 3 April 2000, the Lahore High Court quashed the smuggling charges against the Khans, after an official from the Ministry of Culture and Archaeology came forward to confirm that the tiles ‘now appear[ed] to have been made at some time in the last 40 years’ rather than in the mid-17th century.

  Even in the midst of dealing with the Pakistani justice system, Imran would still allow himself certain relaxations. He spent much of the late spring and summer of 1999 in England, where he unwound as best he could. He seems to have enjoyed these occasional Western breaks for their own sake, but also because they gave him a social leeway generally speaking denied in Pakistan. Jeffrey Archer remembers Imran hosting a lavish party at Annabel’s that May, apparently to celebrate the birth of Qasim Khan. Another friend watched admiringly as the austere Muslim politician supposedly sashayed into a London restaurant with Jemima and a glamorous entourage that included several young women, one of whom ‘brayed back and forth with a bloke in a velvet smoking-jacket who I believe was an earl, but who favoured a butch, urban-aggro way of speech’. Not that Imran was ever completely free of the cares of his job, as a Guardian journalist sent to interview him noted. ‘He seldom sat in the same chair for very long throughout the session. During our two or three hours together he was all over the room and he continued to talk animatedly on the phone on average about once every 10 minutes.’

  Imran also took the opportunity to attend several ties of the 1999 World Cup, which again ended poorly for Pakistan. On 31 May he was on hand at the county ground, Northampton, to see his country lose against the odds to Bangladesh. As Ladbrokes had rated Pakistan 33 to 1 on to win, there were inevitable mutterings about the legitimacy of the result. Imran would later recall, ‘I went blue in the face persuading everyone that it was a genuine loss.’ Three weeks later, Australia beat Pakistan in a cup final that lasted barely four-and-a-quarter hours, roughly half its alloted term, but which seemed to this observer to effectively be over from the moment the Pakistani players padded mournfully on to the field, looking as though their team mascot had just been run over. Again, Imran would be called upon to defend his former colleagues’ honour. It had just been another one of those off-days that happen in cricket, he insisted. The soon-to-be deposed Nawaz Sharif appears not to have been similarly convinced. Shortly after the team’s return to Pakistan, the prime minister called on the government’s accountability bureau to investigate what he called this ‘crushing national humiliation’. As a result, Wasim Akram, Salim Malik and Ijaz Ahmed were all briefly suspended; on 13 September, the three players were fully exonerated and reinstated by the board, although eight months later Justice Qayyum’s inquiry handed down its own long-term ban on Malik.

  On 4 July 1999, President Bill Clinton announced a ceasefire to end the latest Indo-Pakistani clash over Kashmir, the first since the two countries had each successfully detonated a nuclear weapon. Many in Pakistan came to view the peace terms as an unconditional surrender on their part. In particular, the newly appointed army chief of staff appears to have had increasing misgivings about his civilian head of government. ‘I had some minor [issues] with Sharif,’ General Musharraf confirms. ‘Among other things, we fell out about the sackings of two major generals, the appointment of two lieutenant generals, and his request to me to court-martial a journalist for treason. I must say that I was quite amused by the PM’s style of working: I never saw him reading or writing anything.’

  Three months after Pakistan’s withdrawal from the disputed Northern Areas, Nawaz Sharif committed political suicide. In a show of displeasure with his army chiefs, Sharif ordered a commercial airliner carrying General Musharraf, his wife, several generals and 196 civilian passengers to circle over Karachi airport, which he then closed to traffic. After a further series of heated radio exchanges, the plane eventually landed, allegedly with only three minutes of fuel to spare, and Musharraf assumed control of the government. Sharif was put under house arrest, tried by Pakistan’s anti-terrorism court, found guilty of hijacking, and ultimately went into exile in Saudi Arabia. ‘His was the coup,’ his successor later remarked. It was somehow typical of the national cricket board that its current chairman, Mujib ur Rehman, had gone to Sharif’s house as the crisis unfolded in order to congratulate the prime minister on ‘getting rid of that swine Musharraf’; he, too, suffered a sharp decline in his professional fortunes in the years ahead. After the PM’s spokesman had gone on television earlier in the day to announce the mass retirement of Pakistan’s chiefs of staff, commando units loyal to Musharraf had scaled the wall of the state broadcasting complex in Islamabad, taken it without resistance, and turned off the power. An hour later, programming resumed with a picture of a pink rose accompanied by martial music. Troops patrolled the streets of all Pakistan’s major cities, distributing sweets and sherbet to anti-Sharif protestors. It was all over within a few hours, without loss of life. In a keenly awaited formal judgement on the affair, the nation’s Supreme Court later ruled that ‘General Pervez Musharraf, Chief of the Army Staff and Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, is a holder of [a] constitutional post. His purported arbitrary removal by Sharif in violation of the principle of audi alteram partem was ab initio void and of no legal effect.’

  On 6 November 1999, an interviewer asked Imran how long he thought Musharraf’s honeymoon with the electorate would last. While welcoming the military takeover in general terms, especially as Musharraf seemed all but incorruptible compared to his predecessor, Imran admitted being mildly concerned that there might conceivably be ‘a dispute of some sort’ between the new head of state and the judiciary within a period of about six months.

  He was a trifle pessimistic. It was June 2000 before the Supreme Court ruled that Musharraf should hold ‘free and fair elections [with] adequately represented opposition parties’ inside three years — a request the general thought ‘most oppressive’.

  * At least one of these required the services of a ghostwriter. Speaking 18 years after the event, the form
er literary agent Jeremy Lewis recalled Imran arriving in his office to deliver a manuscript. ‘He handed me a leatherbound notebook or diary containing a few jottings and autobiographical snippets. It took me, at most, five minutes to read them; and that, it soon became apparent, was all we had to go on.’ The work in question was called Indus Journey: A Personal View of Pakistan.

  * As just one example, Ted Dexter, at the height of his glamour as England’s captain, stood as the Conservative candidate for Cardiff South East in the 1964 general election. He lost his deposit.

  TEN

  All-Rounder

  In May 2000, Vanity Fair published a profile of ‘cricket superstar Imran Khan and his lovely wife Jemima’ going about their business in the course of a typical day in Lahore. The magazine did not paint an enticing picture of the couple’s current living conditions. The Khans occupied three small rooms in a cramped family home described as having ‘grimy sofas’ and ‘peeling paint’. The water and electricity supply was sporadic, and Jemima and her young sons were plagued by stomach bugs. Imran was reportedly sanguine about his domestic circumstances. ‘Struggle is good for you,’ he told Vanity Fair. ‘If people avoid struggle, they decay. Life has been very easy for Jemima. Maybe I’m a Godsend, to make her struggle.’