When Imran looked back on his life, he made a distinction between the ‘humble sinner’ who had gone around the world playing cricket and bedding an unfeasible number of women, and his current incarnation as the defender of his country’s sovereignty and honour. Although he sometimes spoke as though they were, the two roles weren’t mutually exclusive. Wounded national pride was at the heart of the controversy that brought the Oval Test between England and Pakistan to an abrupt conclusion late that August. Midway through the fourth afternoon of the match, Darrell Hair, the senior of the two umpires, ruled that the tourists had illegally tampered with the ball while in the field. The Pakistani team professed their innocence, but Hair, in consultation with his colleague Billy Doctrove, awarded five penalty runs to England — a public indication that the visitors were guilty of cheating. Pakistan declined to leave their dressing-room after the tea interval, and the officials awarded the match to England. (The tourists did eventually emerge on to the field of play some 20 minutes later, but by then it was the umpires themselves who refused to continue, declaring the game to be over.) It was the first forfeited Test in international cricket’s 129-year history. In the media frenzy that followed it emerged that Hair, amid accusations that he was somehow biased against Asians, if not racist per se, had offered to resign from the ICC’s elite panel of umpires in return for a $500,000 pay-off. This latter detail quickly became a mini-scandal of its own. Watching the whole fiasco unfold, it was possible to see how wars begin: in a steady spiral of mutual recriminations, a dispute that had started out being about the shape of a cricket ball ended up in a furious debate about whether or not the umpires’ ruling was inherently ‘anti-Muslim’.
Imran, who may have been put in mind of his own occasional differences of opinion with match officials, told The Times, ‘Pakistan lost out and so did cricket. The captain, Inzamam, said he made the protest for his country, but if I were him I would have done it by going out and winning the game. In my career,’ he repeated, ‘I saw many great bowlers pulling at the seam of the ball. People used to do it openly, but within limits. The only time tampering became a big issue was after Pakistan mastered reverse swing and the English couldn’t play it.’ Imran later backed away from comments appearing under his name in Pakistan’s Nation newspaper referring to Darrell Hair as a ‘mini Hitler’. ‘I didn’t quite say that,’ he clarified. ‘They take down my column over the phone, so it was misreported. I was talking about all those guys who behave like little dictators when they put on their white coat.’ Asked a year or two later about Hair, Imran described him as ‘a fundamentalist kind of umpire’.
Two months after the Oval Test, Pakistan arrived in India to take part in the ten-nation ICC Champions Trophy. Inzamam was still sitting out a four-match ban for bringing the game into disrepute. His long-term deputy Younis Khan at first declined to take the job, brusquely telling a press conference he refused to be a ‘dummy captain’, but then changed his mind after another PCB reshuffle. The board had already removed Imran’s colleague Zaheer Abbas as team manager. The Pakistan new ball pair of Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif were then sent home after testing positive for drugs, although both were subsequently reinstated on appeal. Australia beat the West Indies by eight wickets in the tournament final. Surveying these events, Imran was broadly sympathetic to his near namesake. ‘Khan has always struck me as a reasonable, easygoing guy,’ he said. ‘While I don’t condone his public outburst, the Pakistan team management had it coming. If anyone had treated me as shabbily as they have Younis, I would have punched a member of the team’s think tank.’
Pakistan’s turbulent and chaotic political development took another of its cyclical turns in the spring of 2007, following the state president’s decision to suspend Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the Chief Justice, on charges that he had misused his office for personal gain. In a show of his displeasure with the legal profession as a whole, General Musharraf would later remove or arrest 69 more judges. According to Imran and a number of his fellow legislators, Chaudhry’s real offence had been to issue various edicts against police abuse, torture and other civil rights infractions while also blocking a series of questionable land-development schemes sponsored by senior army personnel. Apparently concerned that the Supreme Court would rule against his eligibility for a second term in office on the grounds that no active military officer could also serve as president, Musharraf placed Chaudhry under house arrest on 9 March.
The next day, a series of demonstrations and strikes took place throughout the country. Most of the opposition was initially led by bar associations and rights groups seeking to bring Pakistan under the rule of law. But the protests soon evolved into a pro-democracy movement with broad support across the country. Two days of violence in Karachi left 47 people dead and brought pitched battles to the streets of the commercial capital. In an indignant response to his critics, General Musharraf remarked that he was operating in a ‘difficult international situation’. Imran and others believed that he had overlaid that situation with false mystique and black-box hocus-pocus, claiming a high-minded purpose for his work where there was really just a dictator’s low cunning. The government then imposed press censorship and forbade live TV broadcasts. It would be hard to exaggerate Imran’s fury as he used a series of public rallies in Islamabad and Lahore to denounce the ‘failed’ and ‘petty’ tyrant whose nation, with its armed militants and tribal no-go areas, finally appeared to be stumbling towards the nightmare scenario of a failed state. In the midst of the various lobbies, parades and riots, the deposed Chief Justice, a solemn 58-year-old man with a ponderous speaking style, was able to leave the confines of his home and embark on a combined nationwide lecture tour and royal progress, which was enthusiastically received. On 20 July, the Supreme Court bench hearing his case reinstated Chaudhry to his former position: a ‘glorious day’ for Imran, who rather boldly then made a public call for the ‘destruction’ of dictatorships that ignored the rule of law.
Running as a sub-plot to the national crisis was Imran’s own increasingly bitter feud with the MQM and its exiled leader Altaf Hussain. At least some of the long-standing dispute embodied the intense civic rivalry between Karachi and Lahore, although regional and cultural differences were exacerbated by some choice, personally contemptuous remarks on both sides. Imran remained vocally adamant that Hussain and his chief lieutenants were out-and-out terrorists who should be on trial in Pakistan rather than enjoying the hospitality of the British government. For their part, the MQM issued a statement calling Imran a raving lunatic who was ‘unfit to hold public office’. Addressing a press conference, the MQM’s parliamentary leader Dr Farooq Sattar said that he was filing a motion to have the member for Mianwali disqualified under the provisions of the Constitution and Public Representation Act of 1976 ‘which says that no person involved in extra-marital affairs can contest elections in Pakistan’.
On 25 May, a small but nonetheless animated group reportedly gathered in the street outside the MQM offices in Karachi. As police officers stood by, they eventually succeeded in setting fire to a life-size effigy of Imran, recognisable by its bouffant hair, while chanting various minatory slogans. In the coming weeks, each side in the affair took to the airwaves to claim that the other one was fundamentally corrupt. It was a familiar tactic, as Pakistani parties have frequently used selective morality to target and discredit political opponents. Early in June, MQM activists took their case to the offices of the state radio network in Karachi. After giving an interview denouncing Imran, the party’s zonal organiser Siraj Rajput purportedly joined colleagues outside the studio’s front door to air such slogans as ‘Down with Khan’ and ‘Shameful Khan, Fornicator with Women’. A Faisal Sabzwari added that the former national cricket captain had ‘cruelly destroyed the career of many youths belonging to Karachi, and people had not forgotten it’ — a partial reading, at best, of Imran’s tenure. His colleague Haider Rizvi said, ‘Mr Khan is levelling allegations against the leader of a party which rule
s the hearts of millions of people. Mr Khan has avoided a DNA test after he lost the case against Sita White … He is a disgusting example for the Muslims of the country and the world … Imran Khan has lost his sanity after frequent failures in his political life. He is suffering from Altaf-phobia as he has crossed all limits of ethics and decency while criticising Altaf Hussain, who has conquered the hearts of tens of millions of people around the globe.’ Mr Rizvi added that the MQM high command had ‘tried to cool the sentiments of our people [but] if Khan does not stop attacking us our efforts may not be fruitful if he visits the metropolis of Karachi’.
When Imran later attempted to fly out of Lahore for Karachi and thence to file a complaint against Altaf Hussain in London, the police reportedly turned him back at the airport. Three more days of house arrest followed. Imran was, however, able to call a press conference at which he stated, ‘General Musharraf and Altaf Hussain are using fascist tactics … The general has once again proved that he wants to ensure one man’s rule in the country, but he should remember that the nation will never allow him to prolong his forced regime.’ In time Imran’s attitude to both his chief political opponents would come to reach the level of a pure and honest personal hatred rarely seen outside marriage. On 5 September, the Election Commission of Pakistan unanimously rejected the disqualification charges brought against the Tehreek-e-Insaf chairman. ‘The references made on the grounds of immoral practices are dismissed,’ the five-man panel said. Imran’s party colleague Shahid Zulifqar welcomed the ruling, but warned that the Pakistan intelligence agencies ‘have chalked out a plan to kill the chairman’, and that in such an event ‘severe crises [would] grip the nation and Musharraf and Hussain will be responsible’. By mid-2007, the whole country appeared to be near the abyss, said The Times, ‘with the rupee in freefall, among other financial indicators, leav[ing] a society characterised by abysmal poverty, systemic bribery, municipal corruption and tribal gangs squaring off against one another in the hills.’
And the army. Everywhere. In July 2007, Musharraf sent in troops to the Red Mosque, located just 2.5 kilometres (1½ miles) from the president’s palace in the centre of Islamabad. Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, the two brothers who ran the mosque, had taken to sending out emissaries to ‘re-educate’ any women not wearing the veil, and threatened to declare full-scale civil war if the government did not adopt Sharia law. In the subsequent three-day siege, an estimated 250 mosque dwellers were killed, along with 10 soldiers. One Ghazi brother was shot and the other was captured while trying to escape dressed as a girl. Imran called the event a ‘massacre’ and poured scorn on the president’s use of the term ‘collateral damage’ in describing the civilian deaths. It was a ‘callous Americanism’. Back in London, Imran told George Galloway in an interview for The Real Deal that Musharraf was a ‘genocidal tyrant’ who ‘will be out very soon’. There was some muted talk in the National Assembly about issuing articles of impeachment against the president. Although playing a full part in the debate, Imran was apparently able to break off to attend Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar’s sumptuous wedding reception in Judhpur, India, where he was pictured, in the words of one unfriendly website, ‘clad in an elegant tux, mingling with gorgeous, ballgown-clad lovelies, examining a bottle of wine held up for his scrutiny’.
While much of the Pakistani nation as a whole was busy protesting the dismissal of their Chief Justice, their cricket team briskly stepped off a cliff. The side’s long line of World Cup disasters reached its leaden nadir with their three-wicket loss to Ireland’s part-timers in the match played at Kingston, Jamaica, on 17 March — St Patrick’s Day. But even that debacle would be eclipsed just hours later by the death of Pakistan’s Indian-born, South Africa-domiciled, but English coach Bob Woolmer, at the age of 58. They had already been burning effigies of him on the streets of Karachi before the news filtered through on the evening of 18 March. Four days later, the Jamaican police declared that Woolmer had been strangled, and quite possibly poisoned as well. From this point on, the plot thickened rapidly. According to the AP, Woolmer had been about to blow the whistle on ‘rampant illegal betting and match-fixing’ on the part of his charges. The Pakistani players came under official suspicion, and the furore added significantly to the country’s already dangerously combustible mood. ‘I feel Bob was bumped off,’ said Sarfraz Nawaz, not a man to ignore a controversy when he saw one. ‘It was the betting mafia. [Woolmer] must have seen how the Pakistan team went about its business. You could see it from the body language that something was amiss.’ Eight months later, the official Jamaican inquest into the case recorded an open verdict, the foreman of the jury announcing that there were ‘far too many inconsistencies’ to say definitely whether Woolmer was murdered or died from natural causes.
To Imran, among others, the ‘whole tragic saga’ of what happened in Kingston blended in with the long-running anti-Asian prejudice of much of the cricket establishment to create a perfect storm of lies and innuendo. Or that was the gist of his public comments on the case. And it wasn’t just the usual, ‘colonial’ suspects who were engaged in a seemingly never-ending conspiracy to do the Third World down. Imran was notably indignant that ‘the entire Pakistan team was subjected to fingerprinting, DNA tests and wild allegations’, but on turf well beyond that when it came to Sarfraz, whom he recommended the PCB sue for possible defamation. (The board declined to pursue the case.) Whatever its deeper significance, the affair marked a new low in the long, accident-prone history of Pakistani cricket. Following the team’s early departure from the World Cup, Imran again signalled his willingness to ‘sit down with the chairman of the PCB and see what we can do to bring the nation out of this latest crisis’. In the weeks ahead, he was able to break off from affairs of state long enough to criticise Inzamam’s captaincy, comment on the urgent need for new specialist batting and bowling coaches, and once again denounce Pakistan’s domestic cricket structure. By now most of his public statements on the game amounted to a basket of small, overlapping complaints about both the administrators and players under-performing. In a CricInfo poll published that April, Imran himself was voted the sport’s greatest ever all-rounder.
On 4 October 2007, General Musharraf issued a National Reconciliation Ordinance that provided an amnesty from prosecution for all those who had served in government between 1988 and 1999. The unprecedented goodwill gesture was chiefly aimed at the exiled Benazir Bhutto, who in turn agreed that her parliamentary party would not oppose the general’s bid for reappointment. Two days later, Musharraf was duly awarded a second five-year term in office by a lopsided vote of the National Assembly and four provincial councils. Imran was one of 85 state legislators to show their displeasure by promptly resigning their seats. On 18 October, Bhutto returned in triumph to Karachi, where her homecoming motorcade was bombed, some said by al-Qaeda, at a cost of 140 lives and 450 injuries. Imran was unmoved. ‘Bhutto has only herself to blame,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. ‘By making a deal with Musharraf’s government — a deal brokered by the British as well as the Americans — she was trying to get herself off the corruption charges … I don’t know how Benazir has the nerve to say that those killed in the bomb blasts sacrificed their lives for the sake of democracy in Pakistan … I could have warned her that her life would be in danger if she returned here but I doubt she would have listened. But I can tell her this: it is not going to get any easier for her. Whenever she goes out campaigning in public, her life is going to be threatened. It is different for me, because I am not perceived as an American stooge, or a supporter of the war on terror.’
On the afternoon of 3 November, just as much of Pakistan was sitting down to watch coverage of their cricket team’s one-day international against India in Delhi, the nation’s television screens went black. Troops commandeered the state and private broadcasting stations and managed to dismantle much of the country’s phone and internet connections to the outside world. Musharraf, it emerged, had staged what
amounted to a second coup by suspending the constitution and declaring a state of emergency. Once again, the general’s principal target was the senior judiciary, who had been expected to declare his recent reappointment illegal. After their chambers had been raided by the army, seven of the high court’s 11 judges, including Iftikhar Chaudhry, were locked up and the remainder dismissed from office. Three weeks later, Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister deposed by Musharraf’s 1999 coup, finally returned to Pakistan in an arrangement brokered by the US State Department. Sharif had originally gone into exile in Saudi Arabia, but later moved to London, where he occupied a small flat in a Victorian mansion block opposite Selfridges store. Eight years after the event, he remained vocally bitter at having been ‘shot out of office’, although there was nothing unique about that: no civilian government in Pakistan history had ever completed its tenure. Musharraf then paused to announce that parliamentary elections would be held sometime in early or mid January, or, as was eventually the case, the third week of February, before sending in troops to quell a revolt led by an Islamist disc jockey named Maulana Fazlullah in Swat, a mountain valley once popular as a holiday resort, whose mutinous atmosphere Imran now compared to pre-civil war East Pakistan: 297 killed.
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