After abruptly resigning his parliamentary seat, Imran took his protest underground by giving a series of stridently anti-Musharraf interviews from what was described as an ‘undisclosed location outside Lahore’. ‘The police have ransacked my home and ill-treated my family members,’ he told the journalist Zahid Hussain. ‘Our aim is to continue the struggle and mobilise the youth of the country from behind the scenes. This move of Musharraf’s will ignite militancy and extremism.’ As several commentators noted, it was hard to dislike Imran in full flow. He was a born performer. But the crimes he pointed out about the Musharraf regime rang horribly true. He remarked that the general (who only now relinquished his army post) had engineered a ‘Soviet-style coup’ by ‘locking up thousands of activists, imposing mass censorship [and] appointing a long-time crony as chief justice’. Imran himself played the small, humble man in this villainous conspiracy against the people. He felt for the impoverished and illiterate masses, he told reporters, and lambasted ‘foreign and domestic tyrants [who] have destroyed our supreme court, every institution in the land and [are] doing business with crooks and criminals. Musharraf is going to sacrifice 160 million Pakistanis as if they were sheep … He is worse than the Shah of Iran.’ The stage was now set for a climactic showdown between the military hardman and the sports icon whom just five years earlier he had wanted as his prime minister.
Imran initially eluded the dragnet that accounted for some 3,000 other anti-government activists overnight, by ‘climbing out of a window and jumping over the back wall of my family’s house in Lahore when the cops burst in at 1.30 in the morning’. (He later told me that a sympathetic policeman had tipped him off when to expect their visit.) After that he spent 11 days moving between various cousins’ houses and avoiding his cell phone. On 14 November, a picture of a somewhat haggard-looking Imran appeared on the front page of the London Independent under the headline ‘MY LIFE IS IN DANGER’. The following day he broke cover to address a meeting at Lahore’s Punjab University, with the intention of launching a ‘young people’s mass movement for freedom’. At the rally Imran was himself captured by students from the Jamaat-i-Islami political party, who held him in the nearby Centre for High Energy Physics for an hour and a half, and then handed him over to police at the university gates. In custody, he was charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act with inciting violence, calling for civil disobedience and spreading hatred. ‘Most of the university audience had stood and applauded wildly when he first appeared,’ Imran’s friend Naeem-ul-Haque told me. ‘Unfortunately, a small minority of them had been bribed, and it was that group that called the authorities.’ Something of a tug-of-war had then ensued. The mob of students surrounding Imran had quickly become a mini-riot, with one group yelling for him to be allowed to finish his speech, and another group yelling the opposite, as Imran himself maintained a Zen-like calm at the centre of the storm. According to Naeem-ul-Haque, ‘While waiting for the law, the fanatics pushed their prisoner into a nearby room, where some of them took the opportunity to rough him up a bit.’ Imran was apparently undeterred, ‘and even managed to deliver a short lecture to the goon squad when they finally arrived to take him away’.
At that Imran was driven across town to Kot Lakhpat prison, before being transferred overnight to a cell at Dera Ghazi Khan gaol in southern Punjab. It was among the very bleakest outposts of a penal system not known for its enlightenment. Looking understandably wan, Imran arrived at the prison gates in handcuffs and was admitted as a ‘B-class’ inmate, which essentially meant solitary confinement. ‘I then made the mistake of saying that I wouldn’t eat or drink anything while I was in captivity,’ he told me. ‘After 50 hours of this, I could hardly stand up.’ The deputy superintendant of the gaol, a Mr Bakhsh, later questioned the extent of Imran’s hunger strike, telling journalists, ‘Khan had bread, eggs and fruit to eat every day for breakfast.’ When two of Imran’s middle-aged sisters arrived to visit him, they were reportedly manhandled, kicked and spat on by the guards.
Back in London, Jemima called in the couple’s two children and told them that their father had been arrested and ‘might be executed’ as a terrorist. She and her younger son then joined a crowd of several hundred protesters which had formed outside Pakistan’s High Commission. Eight-year-old Qasim Khan held up a picture of Imran with the words ‘FREE MY ABA’ [father]. Other such rallies took place in Washington DC, Madrid, Paris, Sydney and, somewhat improbably, Lodz, in Poland. On 21 November, six days after the citizens’ arrest at Punjab University, the state president magnanimously agreed to release ‘our friend Imran Khan [and] all others held under the interim security provisions’. The BBC speculated that the gesture came about partly because the detention of the nation’s greatest sporting hero was ‘making waves internationally and causing embarrassment for the government’. By then even the American public had been exposed to a week of banner headlines and editorial comment on the subject. Like most of the overseas media in the cricket-playing world, the UK broadsheets treated the president’s proclamation as an event to rank alongside the liberation of Nelson Mandela, with almost audible church bells and cannon fire. The domestic Pakistani reaction was more muted, although Imran was able to convene a rushed press conference to elaborate on his future political plans. Looking gaunt, unshaven, but impressively composed, he told reporters that both his party and that of Nawaz Sharif would be boycotting the scheduled January elections. ‘I feel that even the filing of nomination papers amounts to a betrayal of the judiciary … For 11 years I’ve been saying there can be no democracy or prosperity in Pakistan without an independent justice system. My whole philosophy is based on that … This is the nation’s supreme moment of truth,’ Imran concluded.
According to this reading of events, Musharraf had now become little more than a ‘classic tinpot fascist’, propped up by corrupt foreign interests, who was ‘clearly out [to] silence if not destroy his opponents’. If so, the president appears to have been curiously indulgent of a whole series of well-publicised protest meetings and rallies that took place even before his lifting of the state of emergency. On 1 December, Imran was able to address an overflow audience at the Lahore Press Club, where he again elaborated on his decision not to engage in the upcoming elections, ‘a rigged poll which will please [only] those really leading the country, George W. Bush and his stooges at the Pentagon’. Two days later, he had nothing to say about the Americans, but otherwise repeated his main thesis. ‘Musharraf has painted himself into a corner. He will get out of it only if we dignify this whole fiasco … I won’t … I’m just not going to be part of it … If you know something is a fraud, you should not take part. By participating, you legitimise the process.’ A week later, Imran was indignant that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif had decided to contest the elections after all, the latter after apparently reneging on a prior agreement. ‘It’s a complete case of betrayal,’ he thundered. ‘They say the emergency rule is illegal and yet [they are] legitimising the whole process.’ On 14 December, Imran told reporters, ‘All [Bhutto] wants is power sharing to get her off the corruption charges against her … Nawaz has been lured into the same trap. I think he’s going to be discredited and decimated by massive vote rigging. He’s going to take the biggest blow in the polls.’ With both Pakistan’s former premiers seeming to turn their backs on the All Parties Democratic Movement’s decision of 24 November to ‘rigorously boycott’ the election, Imran was looking to some observers like an increasingly forlorn and isolated figure. ‘Nobody likes him now but the people,’ a Lahore newspaper commented.
Pakistan’s 41-day state of crisis came to an end on 15 December, after the president had taken the opportunity to announce a series of six constitutional amendments that protected him from future prosecution. On 27 December, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a suicide attack in Rawalpindi, just as Imran had feared. Musharraf condemned the killing and once again placed the nation on a state of what he called ‘red alert’, with partial censorship re-imposed and
demonstrations dispersed by club-wielding police. After hurried consultations, the elections were re-scheduled for 18 February 2008. A total of 517 people died in Pakistan as a result of terrorist or anti-terrorist activity in the first seven weeks of the new year.
Imran spent at least some of this uniquely turbulent period not in Pakistan, but in India, where he provided television analysis of his country’s 1–0 loss in the latest Test series. He was to comment that the result could have been 3–0 to the tourists had their fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar ‘applied himself’, a remark that failed to impress Akhtar. On 29 December, two days after Benazir Bhutto’s death, a somewhat unfortunate photograph of Imran wearing a pair of snug blue swimming trunks and relaxing on a sunlounger appeared in various outlets, with captions like ‘Khan chills out in Mumbai’. Since being released from prison he had spent almost all of his working time continuing his attempt to drum up a boycott of the election. ‘People have lost faith in Musharraf,’ Imran told an Indian press conference. ‘Who will now dare to address a political rally? Who will come to attend the rally? Nobody is safe in Pakistan.’
Indeed, there seemed to be a growing consensus that the president’s record since mid-2002 had been a model of serial deviousness, disingenuity and political desperation, and had shown a towering contempt for the Pakistani voter. Nor was Musharraf quite as warmly embraced by his supporters in the war on terror as had once been the case; there is reliably said to have been ‘fury’ at the State Department when the Islamabad government announced a ceasefire with the Taliban in the frontier region, on the pretext of ‘ensuring the integrity’ of the forthcoming election. The truce was signed on the militants’ side by the bin Ladenite commander Beitullah Mehsud, whom Musharraf had publicly blamed for Benazir Bhutto’s death. Imran, for all that, was to take a certain amount of grief for what was variously described as his ‘perverse’ or ‘churlish’ decision to sit out one of his country’s relatively rare spasms of democracy. To Bhutto’s supporter Salman Taseer, the incoming governor of Punjab, ‘Khan uses his foreign contacts, or actually his ex-wife’s contacts, to come on CNN … Every time he got the chance to make a decision he, without any doubt, made the wrong decision. He fights with every person; he takes pot shots at almost everyone. He hasn’t left anyone in Pakistan alone. The drama of him tearing up his [nomination] papers was just ridiculous.’ Demonstrators were occasionally to be seen milling around outside Imran’s office in Islamabad. Sometimes they shouted that they were there to arrest him, and once, reportedly, to kill him, but quite often all they wanted was for him to accompany them to the president’s palace and seize power. Even more than was the case with other Pakistani politicians, people seemed to either love or hate him. ‘He wasn’t one to excite tepid feelings,’ Bhutto herself had once remarked. By 2008 Imran’s cuttings file was a similarly bipolar collection comprising, on the one hand, pieces in which he held forth about the state of the world, and on the other, tabloid tales of his late-night misadventures. To The Times he was ‘basically shy’, to Pakistan’s Daily Times, ‘a bit of a peacock’.
As Imran went around in the early weeks of 2008 conducting his non-campaign, he seemed to become, if possible, even more fixated on Musharraf. The president’s malign influence was everywhere, from destroying the judiciary to failing to prevent the fall in wheat prices on the global commodity markets. When Ricky Ponting’s Australians began to have second thoughts about touring Pakistan in the spring, Imran blamed the head of state for that, too. ‘Musharraf blindly follows the US in the war against terror and we are paying the price,’ he told the AP. ‘Because of him we are now at a stage where no one is ready to play cricket here.’* Even in 2006, it had seemed to an old playing colleague of Imran’s that ‘he was a bit stuck’ on the subject of the president, while Today found the relationship ‘strangely symbiotic, [with] Musharraf taking the part of the great white whale to Khan’s Ahab’.
With nothing currently to play for in Pakistan itself, Imran then left for another tour to drum up funds and support in the United States. For 11 or 12 days he bounced around the east coast with just one companion, an American Tehreek-e-Insaf organiser named Ali Zaidi, for the most part relying on local train services or budget rental cars to get about. The overall impression was some way removed from the popular image of a ‘sporting Maharajah’, to use Newsweek’s phrase. Imran told any US journalists willing to listen that Musharraf was a tyrant and a thug, and that all would be well again with Pakistan given a period of ‘political stability’. Asked by the Wall Street Journal whether he aspired to run the country himself, Imran replied, ‘It’s not a question of aspirations. I know, God willing, one day I am going to succeed. And that’s not very far away. I know that the people in Pakistan perceive me as probably the most credible leader.’ During the tour Imran also attended meetings at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the National Press Club and Amnesty International, and even managed to secure an audience with Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the US Senate. Ali Zaidi told me that the two of them had decided to forego meeting with anyone in the Bush administration ‘as they are all on their way out’. Regrettably, Barack Obama was not available. A well-placed source added that Imran’s meeting with Reid had in essence consisted of ‘little more than a few glassy-eyed pleasantries’ on the Nevada senator’s part, followed by a bland joint statement. Reid was, however, personally ‘quite impressed by Imran, who he seemed to think had been an international croquet star in his previous career’. One or two other Washington luminaries were apparently struck by the spectacle of a distinguished overseas politician travelling around the country carrying his own luggage, something of a novelty in a society whose elected representatives would wear togas if they felt they could get away with it. On his way home to Pakistan, Imran made a brief stop in London, where he joined Jemima and a small group of supporters standing in the rain in Whitehall to protest against a state visit by Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf waved cheerfully to the crowd as his car sped past them into Downing Street.
While they were in America, I managed to make contact with Imran and Ali Zaidi, and ultimately with a number of their non-travelling colleagues. The exchanges that followed weren’t without their frustrations. At one point Zaidi (who went on to describe Imran as ‘the most determined man I’ve ever met’) rang me back late at night from a sleeper train travelling somewhere on the eastern seaboard, and a male American voice could be heard shouting at him in the background to ‘turn the fucking phone off’. A second Tehreek-e-Insaf organiser explained that Imran felt there was ‘too much shit’ going on in the current Pakistani election, and that his strategy was therefore to ‘let the rats fight among themselves’ and ‘regroup in 2009’. Somewhat later, a third party official contacted me and drew my attention to a mysterious Gospel of Barnabas (published in al-Madinah, and also in Leicester) as a key text in helping to explain some of the ‘logical fallacies of Christianity’, before going on to chat affably about the state of English cricket. I was aware, throughout my conversations with the three men, that they shared a deep and unaffected respect for Imran. ‘It is perfectly possible history will judge the chairman as a most significant world leader,’ one of them told me.
Although I’d been warned several times that ‘the chairman’ now rarely spoke about his past life, Imran himself proved to be an engaging interviewee and conversational all-rounder who slid smoothly from reminiscing fondly about his time at Oxford to denouncing the foreign policy of ‘the Bush and Blair regimes’. The only difficulty lay in establishing contact with him in the first place. In addition to the strain of trying to mobilise ‘Pakistan’s only genuinely democratic political movement’ while simultaneously running a major cancer hospital and organising long-haul visits to and from his young sons, it now emerged that the sense of timing Imran had shown in abundance when he was at the crease was less pronounced in his civilian life. Even after agreeing a mutually convenient time to speak, a caller was apt to receive one of three responses, accordi
ng to the vagaries both of Imran’s schedule and the Pakistani phone system.
The first, with a robotic voice intoning: ‘Sorry. This number is powered off.’
The second, after a loud and highly animated exchange in Urdu could be heard going on for some moments in the background, culminating in a noise like that of a phone being repeatedly banged against a wall: ‘The chairman is unavailable. Try later.’
The third, with Imran himself answering on the first ring: ‘OK, go.’
No matter how early he started, the day was ‘never long enough’ for all the private meetings that party officials had requested, for all the phone calls that had to be made or answered. Each time Imran’s assistant appeared in the doorway of the inner sanctum, more and more pages of the pad he held in his hand would be filled with urgent appeals for a moment of the Leader’s time. The party was starting a nationwide campaign to provide subsidised bread to the poor. There were hospital fundraisers at which he had to put in appearances. An affiliated diagnostic centre was under construction in Karachi. That, too, needed money. In his spare time, Imran was supervising the building of Namal Technical College on 2.5 hectares (6 acres) of desert outside Mianwali as a joint venture with the University of Bradford, of which he was chancellor. So it seems reasonable to say, as he often did, that he was ‘quite busy’. Even when he eventually got back to his new hilltop farm outside Islamabad, after his standard 12-hour day, there was rarely a night in which his mobile didn’t ring at least once. Likewise in other houses in far-flung Pakistani towns, in the homes of provincial party workers and donors, a phone would ring in the early-morning darkness and a man, jolted out of sleep, would reach groggily for the receiver to hear the Leader’s voice on the line. ‘It’s round the clock stuff,’ Imran told me cheerfully.
Imran Khan Page 49