Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  It would be fair to say that the Khans were not pleased with Vanity Fair’s overall depiction of their lifestyle. To Imran, the whole thing was ‘overblown’ and ‘another example of the Western media’s negative portrayal of life in a developing country’. Besides, he added in an interview with The Times, it was quite wrong to talk about the family living in Lahore when they had since moved to Islamabad, where they occupied a ‘seven-bedroom property in one of the city’s most exclusive areas’. Imran’s comments were echoed by Jemima, by now a convert to Islam, who dismissed the idea that she had any doubts about Pakistan. ‘I am perfectly happy with my life out here and very settled,’ she assured reporters. ‘The problem is that if I say Imran is a very unmaterialistic man and that a life of luxury doesn’t matter to him, that gets interpreted as “He forces me to lead a life of misery”, and it’s not what I’m saying,’ Jemima added. As a result of the brouhaha, Imran’s animus against at least some of the press became more noticeable, as, in time, did his bitterness and anger at what he felt to be General Musharraf’s betrayal of his promise to usher in a new era of accountability to Pakistani politics. What followed, instead, was two years’ relentless succession of austerity drives, bank crashes, riots, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, suicides and hijackings, which brought Pakistan up to the events of September 2001.

  Thanks to a lavish public expenditure programme undertaken by both the Bhutto and Sharif administrations, there were, at least, a few visible fruits to show for Pakistan’s national bankruptcy. As state president, General Musharraf was able to enjoy a splendid new residence in Islamabad that Today described as ‘undecided between Nazi neoclassicism and Las Vegas kitsch’. There were various other, less picturesque schemes involving the digging of cross-country sewer lines and improving the nation’s antiquated road and rail infrastructure, but these seemed to be mired in what even Musharraf refers to as ‘chronic nepotism and incompetence … [the] victim of enormous corruption among ministers, bureaucrats and bankers, the last being handpicked by the first because all the major banks were nationalised’.

  Politically and economically, then, Pakistan would seem to have been primed for a leader who promised to restore budgetary discipline while pursuing a Utopian-liberal social agenda. But more than four years after its formation, the Tehreek-e-Insaf remained a niche player which consistently attracted less than 3 per cent support in national opinion polls. By 2000, some observers had concluded that the party would never amount to anything more than a one-man show that relied almost exclusively on Imran’s personal fame and connections for its survival. Conventional wisdom held it that he should ally himself with one of the established political dynasties, perhaps that of the Bhuttos, if he was serious about aspiring to high office. Benazir Bhutto herself had other ideas; she was sure that her ‘lifelong friend’ (still only 47 years old) was ‘simply too proud’ to be party to any back-room compromises. And she believed that sooner or later the country would come to choose between the two Oxford contemporaries as ‘a national beacon of hope [after] the despondency of the Musharraf years’.

  At the conclusion of a one-day international between Pakistan and Sri Lanka in February 2000, the master of ceremonies announced Imran Khan as the man of the match instead of Wasim Akram. The capacity crowd’s roar had rarely subsided throughout the day’s play, but at that it welled up to the accompaniment of several dozen firecrackers. It was further proof that, whatever his electoral prospects, ‘Khan Saab’ remained an icon of Pakistani cricket, as well as being the father figure to many of the current players. When the announcer’s mistake was corrected and Wasim came forward to collect his award, he remarked that he ‘didn’t mind in the least’ being called Imran, since he was ‘the man responsible for making Pakistan the world force it is today’.

  Between commenting on everything from nuclear proliferation to the plight of Sindh’s nomadic herdsmen, Imran continued to deliver some typically caustic views on the national sport. Whether published in Pakistan, India or England, his cricket journalism remained unflinchingly opinionated, tending to hammer away at a single point, quite often involving the bungling of a bureaucracy somewhere, and as a rule avoiding the charm and irony of his memoirs. He was not shy about moral judgements. ‘Institutional racism’ in sport was ‘as unacceptable as the hated apartheid regime’ had been in South Africa. Nor had he quite yet reconciled himself to the ‘inept power elite’ still apparently behind Pakistani cricket. In early 2004, Shoaib Akhtar, one of Imran’s heirs as the team’s prime strike bowler, controversially pulled out of a Test against India with an injury he described, with unusual precision, as a ‘slight strain of the eleventh rib’. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) was not impressed with the diagnosis. Following the Test, they called Shoaib in front of a specially convened medical commission to investigate him and four other injured players. Imran, in turn, launched a stinging broadside at the PCB, which was chaired at the time by his old Test colleague Ramiz Raja. ‘This is a joke … a farce … Nowhere in the world has a medical inquiry of fast bowlers ever been conducted,’ he said. Not for the first time, the board ‘has made a complete mockery of Pakistani cricket’. In private, Imran advised Shoaib to look into the possibility of suing ‘the men in blazers who have questioned your integrity’.

  On 28 December 2000, Jemima, her sons, her mother and other members of her family were on a British Airways flight to Nairobi when a mentally deranged Kenyan student broke into the cockpit and attacked the pilot. The jet plunged 10,000 feet and, as with the Musharraf incident a year earlier, was said to be ‘only moments’ from crashing into the desert below. Jemima, by her own account, stayed calm because of the children, hugged them, and prayed ‘like mad’ (to whom?) throughout the ordeal. It must have been exquisitely terrifying for a woman who disliked flying under the best of circumstances. Eventually the would-be hijacker was subdued, and the plane landed safely in Nairobi. Imran had not been on the flight himself, but later joined his family at their hotel. His first words to Jemima were, ‘Well, baby, I hear you had a little turbulence. You should have flown PIA.’

  The story, if true (and it comes from Jemima), was quintessential Imran. There was his typically cool and phlegmatic disregard for mortal fear, even when it was his immediate family who were the ones at risk. Since Imran believed that the date and time of his own death was predetermined, he didn’t fret about it. ‘If you are involved in the politics of change, you could be bumped off at any moment [and] I’ve come to terms with that,’ he remarked. ‘I am a Muslim and I believe my time to go is ordained by my God. Death doesn’t scare me in the least.’ On top of that, there was his only half-facetious dig at Jemima’s electing to fly British Airways when there was a ‘perfectly good Pakistani carrier’ available. By now, possibly, it’s been established that Imran was fiercely patriotic. But he seemed to go beyond that here, implying that his wife, who called herself ‘both Pakistani and British’, had revealed her true national colours in her choice of airline. It was a small point, but an example, perhaps, of the sort of perceived slight that can cumulatively burn a marriage.

  By the time of the BA incident, the Khans had finally taken up residence in their villa in the Himalayan foothills. Oddly enough, several friends and political colleagues who visited Imran in his alpine idyll found him variously ‘withdrawn’, ‘subdued’ or even ‘depressed’. According to one party supporter, ‘While remain[ing] the most open and obliging of men … while receiving hordes of petitioners, while giving aid to cancer victims, needy friends and down-and-out cricketers, he was never one for loving humanity blindly.’ Perhaps Imran was merely reacting to the larger national picture. A further two years of headlong decline had dashed most of the hopes he’d allowed himself at the time of General Musharraf’s takeover. With a balance of payments deficit of roughly $6 billion and rising, Pakistan had since reached the stage where it had to rely for its survival on a series of institutionalised loan sharks charging up to 60 per cent annual interest, as no one offerin
g better terms was available. But Imran was, at least, a willing and by all accounts doting host to his daughter Tyrian White in the summer of 2001. The nine-year-old reportedly spent two months staying with him and her putative Anglo-Pakistani family at the Goldsmiths’ home in London, before returning to her mother in California.

  Irritating and embarrassing as snide Karachi media reports about his love child were to Imran, far more ominous was the direction the government was taking in the build-up to the scheduled 2002 election. By then President Musharraf at least had the distinction of having held high office over a sustained period with no serious charges of personal corruption against him. In Pakistan, that in itself was an achievement. Similarly, he could, and did, claim credit for modernising a number of the state’s archaic administrative functions. Under Musharraf’s Local Government Ordinance of 2000–1, elected assemblies replaced the existing colonial arrangement by which a commissioner and a prefect of police ran the various regions much like a personal fiefdom. From now on, power would be devolved into the hands of a network of some 5,000 individual councils, each with a 33 per cent mandatory minimum representation of ‘women [and] other minorities’. Indeed, it’s arguable that the general did more for grass-roots democracy in Pakistan than any of his highly touted predecessors. In time Musharraf both lowered the national voting age and created 60 new reserved seats for women in the 342-strong National Assembly — not, on the face of it, the initiatives of a ‘power-crazed tinpot dictator’, as Imran once characterised him.

  Still, even over the course of his first two years in office, Pakistan’s chief executive (and, as from June 2001, self-appointed president) would elicit a wide range of reactions. In time, Musharraf and his henchmen introduced the country to the full range of characteristic features of Third World military regimes, including, but not limited to, mass arrests and round-ups, interference in the judicial system, and blanket press censorship. Such things tend to polarise opinion. In a departure from her public speaking style, Benazir Bhutto once described the general as ‘the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth’. President George W. Bush, in contrast, saw him as an ‘intellectual engine’. In manner the hyperactive Musharraf was the Energizer Bunny, making it hard for his political opponents, or anyone else, to get a word in edgewise. Time and distance have not conspicuously enhanced his reputation. Anyone making it to the end of Musharraf’s memoir In the Line of Fire will have encountered a central character who manages to combine platitudes about ‘new politics’, ‘innovative form[s] of popular consultation’ and a pledge to carry on ‘listening and learning’ with a degree of self-regard, if not rampant megalomania, reminiscent of the great comic-opera political monsters of the recent past. ‘Mugabe-esque’ might be stretching the point too far, but the general’s cheerful suspension of the national constitution, among other activities, would surely have brought a receptive gleam to that particular tyrant’s eye.

  For 53 years, Pakistan had observed the 11th of September as a solemnly unifying public holiday commemorating the anniversary of the death of the state’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The date assumed a new and nationally more divisive significance as from 2001. In the seven years that followed, Islamabad increasingly came to treat the West as ‘a sort of giant cash machine’, in the words of the Spectator, extracting some $12 billion of aid from the US alone. Britain and other nations, along with multilaterals including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, donated as much again. Some of this munificence would be used for its intended purpose — preventing terrorism by ‘provid[ing] the United States and her allies with certain specific flight corridors, intelligence, travel information and records, [and] internal security data which will serve both our nations’ interests, [and] preserve us from the threat of an Indo-American pact,’ as Musharraf put it in an emergency television and radio broadcast on 19 September 2001. Far more went into the familiar ‘commissions’ which lined the pockets of senior Pakistani military and civilian officials, including those at the very highest level of government.*

  ‘Everyone here wanted to help the Americans immediately after 9/11,’ Imran told me. ‘But they squandered the goodwill. Many of us in Pakistan watched in horror as the US began pounding Afghanistan … To me, the Taliban were an aberration. Everyone knows that kind of medieval zeal is not what Islam is about. They were an embarrassment to much of the Muslim world, it’s true. But that still doesn’t make them terrorists.’

  It would be quite wrong to claim, as certain critics did, that Imran actively welcomed the 9/11 attacks as somehow representing an overdue lesson in humility for the world’s one remaining superpower, if not God’s punishment for alleged injustices against Muslims. He made it abundantly clear both at the time and subsequently that he condemned the outrage. But it would be reasonable to say that the struggling Tehreek-e-Insaf party was re-energised at least in part by its initially lonely, principled stand against the excesses of what became the ‘war on terror’. As in any war, pressures for conformity against the enemy rose and flourished, at least in the early stages, and the fear of disloyalty deeply influenced Pakistani politics. Zeal for the ‘great patriotic cause’ appears to have been behind a number of Musharraf’s post-9/11 initiatives, such as his withdrawal of funding for some 200 Islamic educational institutions, and a wide range of public-order crackdowns. Imran, by contrast, took the opportunity to flay the United States for what he felt to be its ‘unjust and unethical’ overreaction to having been ‘hit’. On 13 October 2001, denouncing the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, he spoke of a sense of ‘helplessness’ at the direction the war on terror already seemed to be taking. ‘In Pakistan there’s a terrible feeling [that] we’re no longer in control,’ he said. ‘It is very difficult to convince the people here that on one side is this huge superpower and on the other are these impoverished women and children in Afghanistan who have already suffered 20 years of war. It’s very difficult not to sympathise with them against the United States … Terrorism is bred where there is hatred and anger, and I’m afraid that when civilians are killed there will be a lot more hatred against America.’

  Seven years later, events had done nothing to modify this bleak assessment. ‘If my women … my wife, my family, was hurt by a bomb, or killed, I would pick up a gun,’ Imran announced in November 2008. ‘To shoot [coalition] forces,’ he clarified. ‘Innocent people are dying in my country … The American attitude is shocking. All they want is obedient slaves.’

  ‘Imran seemed to make few allowances for his bride,’ an anonymous Goldsmith family source later revealed to several British newspapers. By 2002, ‘Jemima had struggled with homesickness, a huge fundraising workload, pregnancy and illness. Married life soon fell short of the ideal. With the cultural differences so extreme, each felt that he or she was the one who had sacrificed more, and the creeping impression that this wasn’t appreciated by the other party created a silent but growing hurt.’

  After the unusually public honeymoon had come domestic routine, ‘immense loyalty and affection … many good things shared … but overlaying it all the petty little annoyances of marriage, imperfections noted, and of course the unique charms of moving in with the in-laws for five years’. As well as the background pressures, Jemima had faced the relentless attacks of her husband’s opponents and the so-called antiquities smuggling charges of 1998–9. She had at least enjoyed three years of relative success with her eponymous fashion label, which at its peak employed around a thousand Pakistani women. ‘The clothes are a bit of both East and West,’ Jemima announced, ‘because that is how I feel myself.’ The business collapsed shortly after 11 September 2001, when orders from New York ‘dried up overnight’.

  Political matters were not going all that well either. The Tehreek-e-Insaf had fared poorly in the phased Pakistani local government elections held between December 2000 and July 2001. After five years, Imran’s party remained either ‘frustratingly in chrysalis’ or ‘a complete joke’, depending on which newspaper you re
ad. One Karachi-based media outlet compared its core appeal to that of a ‘hermit gibber[ing] in the wilderness’. As low as people’s opinion of the ruling elites might be, most of them had not as yet been seduced by Imran’s message of change. ‘What we’ve seen in Pakistan in 11 years is that four governments have been dismissed for corruption,’ he remarked in June 2002. ‘The voters are sick of the same people. They have seen them time and time again. Basically politics has been confined to families and the same families have ruined Pakistan.’ Imran evidently saw himself as a bit different — the solitary figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of his countrymen as they slid into the shark-infested waters of another national election. ‘I’m unlike all the other candidates,’ he insisted. ‘The fact that every year I collect millions of rupees from Pakistani people for a charitable project makes me the only politician who can do it, who people believe in. That’s what is lacking in Pakistani politics. People do not trust the politicians.’

  Perhaps alone, too, of the party leaders contesting the elections scheduled for October 2002, Imran spent much of the preceding summer based in a Georgian mansion in the London suburbs, from where he was able to watch a full season’s cricket. Ten years earlier, the journalist Qamar Ahmed had exchanged words with his nation’s World Cup-winning captain in the course of a flight between Adelaide and Sydney. ‘We nearly came to punching each other until Javed intervened,’ Ahmed recalled, the second time that particular trinity had occurred. In June 2002, a more conciliatory Imran walked into the Lord’s press box during a break from his television commentary on England’s first Test of the summer with India. ‘I think he felt embarrassed about what had happened,’ says Ahmed. ‘He shook hands with me in front of all the pressmen present. It was a big gesture. We’re now friends as before.’