On 6 February 2008, police turned back a small group of Tehreek-e-Insaf officials after they had flown in from Islamabad to address a rally in Karachi. The Sindh home minister Akhtar Zamin explained that Imran and his party were not welcome in his province because they were ‘going around disrupting the upcoming elections and creating apathy … If Khan does not want to participate it is fine, but he should not incite other people to do so. He will be free to visit Sindh after the polls have closed,’ Mr Zamin announced. Three days later Jemima was, however, able to fly to Pakistan and to conduct an interview with the state president. Musharraf apparently assured her that he would act as a ‘father figure’ to the country’s new prime minister, while expressing relief that ‘I won’t have to see him for weeks’. He reportedly then went on to describe the twice sacked Chief Justice Chaudhry as ‘the dregs’ and ‘the scum of the earth’. (The president’s office later complained that many of his remarks had been ‘wilfully misrepresented [by] Mrs Khan’.) Back in London later in the month, Jemima was twice photographed leaving her car on her way in to restaurants without first having taken the precaution of donning any underwear. The editorial writer in the Daily Times wasn’t impressed. ‘What was she doing in Pakistan with that demure dupatta on her head, penning sanctimonious articles about her great conversion to Islam? It didn’t take the same woman long to throw off the hijab and cavort in skimpy bikinis on French beaches with her man of the moment,’ the paper concluded, harshly describing Jemima as a ‘serial protester’.
In the election of 18 February the Bhuttos’ PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML (N) parties won a combined total of 168 seats, against 42 for the pro-Musharraf PML(Q). The president graciously announced that he accepted the result, and ‘emphasis[ed] the need for harmonious coalition in the interest of peaceful governance’. He went on to blame the media as the main cause of his fall in popularity. Imran wasn’t entirely satisfied, telling a news conference on 22 February that Musharraf should step down immediately and branding a speech by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice congratulating the Pakistani people on their free and fair elections as an ‘intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the country’.*
A month later, the Bhuttos’ supporter Yousaf Raza Gilani was sworn in as Pakistan’s 26th prime minister. Mr Gilani, a former speaker of the National Assembly, had previously spent five years in gaol after being convicted of putting some 600 of his friends and constituents on the government payroll. After protracted discussions with his coalition partners, he and the president were eventually to free most of the judges arrested under the November 2007 state of emergency. Imran continued his dogged campaigning on the issue up to the end (and a year later, would still be calling — ultimately successfully — for the reinstatement of Chief Justice Chaudhry), walking at the head of a ‘lawyers’ march’ on Islamabad on 9 March.
As a result of all these factors, the Tehreek-e-Insaf had maintained its independence but lost its representation in parliament. The journalist Karan Thapar asked Imran whether he regretted boycotting the election, as ‘had you contested, you’d be a minister and your political career would get a boost, which it badly needs’. There was an understandable touch of asperity in his reply. ‘I’m not in politics for my own career,’ he told her. ‘The Almighty has been kind to me and I have everything I want. I came in for a movement for justice … For 11 years, my party was clamouring all over the place and no one paid any attention. But for the first time in history a chief justice takes a stand against a dictator and I had to stand with him.’ Just as the new administration was being sworn in Imran was forced to leave Islamabad hurriedly and fly to Lahore, where his father, Ikramullah Khan, died on 20 March.
The Tehreek-e-Insaf party may have been a lonely one, but it was principled; and ambitious. In the spring of 2008, Imran continued to call for the removal of Musharraf and the repudiation of ‘all US influence’ in the region. A State Department briefing claiming that the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan could lay claim to be ‘the most prolific terrorist zone anywhere in the world’ (the London, Madrid and Bali bombings all having been planned there) was ‘total arrogance on [Washington’s] part’, Imran countered. ‘We should shun the American dictation,’ he announced at a press conference after a two-day party central executive committee meeting. ‘This is intolerable … A gross intrusion.’ Imran wasn’t finished yet: Musharraf was ‘loathed’, he remarked elsewhere, and this was largely due to his ‘connivance’ with the ‘puppetmaster Bush’. Indeed, he was relentless on the subject. If Imran came across an inquisitive reporter, born in Mumbai, say, long after the foundation of modern Pakistan, he would deliver a short — or not so short — lecture on the history of American post-war meddling in the area from the formation of SEATO through to Washington’s involvement in the 2008 elections, with descants on the likes of Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld. At least there was little mystery about what he believed in and wanted to do, as only the thinnest space appears between the Imran who made public statements and the man who engaged in exchanges with other politicians, between what he told press conferences and what he whispered to a party co-worker. As a Pakistani journalist familiar with both men remarked, ‘forthrightness was one of Khan’s most outstanding traits. Both he and Musharraf were apt to speak their minds.’
In the summer, Imran was back in London to raise money for the party, and to complain about the Americans. ‘The United States is pounding the tribal areas, and innocent people are dying. There are no morals in this war,’ he told the Independent. Imran also addressed a seminar on Indo-Pakistani relations as a last-minute replacement for Tariq Ali. He was ‘doggedly on-track’, according to his friend Syra Vahidy. ‘I didn’t speak with him after the session because he was surrounded by so many adoring fans, mostly women.’ In July, Imran was back to chiding the ‘US-led invasion of Afghanistan’ in a series of interviews, at least some of which dwelt on his past life more than he might have wished. Later in the month he did agree to appear in a charity cricket match organised by Jemima’s brothers, and enjoyed stands with both his sons. It was his first even semi-competitive appearance in some 10 years. ‘I couldn’t walk for days afterwards,’ he admitted.
While Imran recuperated, Musharraf was facing the final curtain in Islamabad. He maintained his formidable sang-froid to the end. When the president boasted at the Labour Day celebrations on 1 May that Pakistan was more ‘nationally productive’ than at any time since 1999, the new prime minister, standing next to him, was seen apparently shaking with laughter. If nothing else, however, the regime was quite good at manufacturing propaganda: many overseas commentators bought Musharraf’s line. Then, on 18 August, the president announced that he was resigning rather than face impeachment charges drawn up by the governing coalition. In a defiant speech, he said that he had believed it was his destiny to save Pakistan, helped by God, and that he had prevented it from becoming a terrorist state. ‘I leave myself in the hands of the people,’ he concluded. At that, Musharraf inspected a guard of honour outside his white palace in Islamabad, stepped into a black limousine and left for an undisclosed location. In Karachi, lawyers danced in jubilation.
Three weeks later, Pakistan’s parliament elected a new head of state to replace caretaker president Muhammad Sumroo. The man with his finger on the country’s nuclear trigger emerged as Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. As well as being linked both to the death of his brother-in-law Murtaza and to the oligarchic looting of the Pakistani exchequer — although formally cleared of all charges — Zardari now faced questions about the state of his mental health. In a corruption case brought against him by the Musharraf government, Zardari’s own lawyers told a London court in 2007 that he had suffered from dementia, depression and other psychological problems. They claimed that he was traumatised as a result of years spent in various Pakistani prisons, where he had reportedly been tortured on the orders of his political opponents. In Pakistan, Zardari had long been known as anything from Mr Ten Pe
rcent to Mr Thirty Percent, and his alleged corruption was widely regarded as the reason for the early demise of the family dynasty’s two governments. In interviews, he described his ascent to power as ‘revenge’ for his wife’s killing.
Musharraf’s departure from the scene brought no immediate relief to the vast majority of the Pakistani people, who were now witnessing both rampant inflation and the collapse of their currency. Even as Zardari assumed office, a bomb blast claimed at least 22 lives in Peshawar. On 3 September, gunmen attempted to assassinate the new prime minister as he passed by in his motorcade. A fortnight later, another explosion, this time at the Mariott Hotel in Islamabad, killed 45 and left 200 injured. Most reports blamed the outrages on either al-Qaeda or ‘Talibanised sectors of the Pakistani armed forces’ impatient for control of the country’s remote frontier provinces. Zardari did, however, take certain steps towards ending his country’s time-honoured role as a client state of the Western allies. On 4 September 2008, US special forces launched a six-hour combined air-ground assault to destroy terrorist sanctuaries in the tribal areas. The unanimous reaction of Pakistan’s newly seated parliament was to call on its government to repel any future such raids with military force. Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, agreed, declaring that his country’s territorial integrity ‘would be defended at all costs’. When the US military attempted another ground attack 12 days later, employing armed helicopters, it was forced to retreat after coming under sustained fire from Pakistan’s army. The next day, the president’s office in Islamabad issued a press release announcing its policy on US incursions: ‘The orders are clear … open fire.’
Ironically, Imran himself, after waging a dogged and sometimes lonely campaign over several years for Musharraf’s departure, was apparently unenthused by many of these developments. When I asked him about the president’s exit, he told me that Pakistan’s ruling elite ‘will always protect themselves … It’s very much business as usual here. One guy will obligingly scratch the other guy’s back.’ Seeming to confirm this thesis, Asif Ali Zardari announced late in 2008 that he had no objection to his predecessor as president ‘put[ting] his feet up in Pakistan’. Musharraf took him at his word by moving into a luxury villa, complete with a swimming pool and strawberry bed, in the suburbs of Islamabad. It was a depressing scenario for anyone who had fought as long and passionately for justice as Imran had, although it’s just possible that there might have been deeper, psychological factors that contributed to his dark mood. An admiring friend told me, ‘When Immy begins to feel pleasantly relaxed or playfully enjoying, I think, some danger sign goes up, some inner commandment says no, and he falls back on his constantly replenished list of problems to solve.’
Compared with certain other Pakistani international cricketers of his era, characterised by Omar Kureishi as being ‘all gold medallions and mediocrity’, Imran (who, after all, had actually won the World Cup) was practically an ascetic. And certainly by the standards of Islamabad’s political class, few of whom took their call for national self-sacrifice too personally, he struck even his most vocal critics as being almost excessively frugal: when he travelled abroad he took ‘one battered suitcase’ with him, which, as mentioned, he carried himself. Even so, as he often said, he had to make a living. Anyone thinking that Imran merely waited around for rupees to fall into his lap would have only a partial understanding of the man. Now that he had taken himself out of the National Assembly his main forum was the world’s television and radio studios, where he held forth on everything from Pakistan’s literacy rate to the state of her fast bowling. As Imran remarked to the Independent in November 2008, he could earn enough in 30 days’ work as a TV sports pundit ‘to run my kitchen for the rest of the year’. Most, but not all, of the money came from contracts in India.
As a broadcaster, Imran had all the natural equipment: lucidity, expertise, an eye for visual detail and a mouth that moved as fast as his mind. He wasn’t shy of expressing an opinion. Anyone he thought guilty of under-performing, be it a callow debutant or a wizened pro like Inzamam, could expect a tongue-lashing of regal proportions. An informal poll conducted by Cricket Lore magazine rated him the game’s fourth most popular celebrity commentator — qualified fame, perhaps, but better than unqualified obscurity. One passing concern raised by a number of respondents was that Imran could occasionally seem uncharacteristically obsequious towards an older retired player such as Ian Chappell, ‘behav[ing] as a favourite nephew might towards a rich and ailing uncle who had hinted there might be something rather good for him in his will’.* About the only other criticism that could be levelled against his microphone technique was that it was sometimes prone to a certain dour humourlessness: he wasn’t one to josh around about streakers or chocolate cakes. ‘We had Imran up in the Channel 4 box a few years back,’ Mark Nicholas recalled in 2009. ‘Technical insights were good, but otherwise there wasn’t much aptitude. Dermot Reeve took the piss out of him during an interview, doing an impression of the great man that seemed disrespectful and he didn’t take kindly to. Actually Dermot holds him in great affection, but it went over badly and Imran never came back.’
The troubled history of Pakistan’s national sport had taken another abrupt turn in April 2008, when the PCB banned their team’s strike bowler Shoaib Akhtar for five years after finding him guilty of repeated breaches of discipline. The board had already imposed a two-year probation on Akhtar after he hit his colleague Mohammad Asif with a bat before the start of a Twenty20 World Cup match. Imran came down firmly on the side of the player. Apparently the problem was once again due to Musharraf, whose personal appointee as chairman of the PCB, Nasim Ashraf, a US-trained medical doctor with little or no previous experience of sports administration, had turned that body ‘into a sort of banana republic’. Ashraf left his post that August, on the same day that Musharraf announced his own resignation; the Lahore High Court later suspended Shoaib’s ban pending a final resolution, but upheld a fine against him of 7 million rupees. Imran expressed cautious optimism (perhaps wisely, in the light of subsequent developments) about Allen Stanford’s so-called ‘bash, dash and dazzle’ version of the game, but reminded interviewers that there would always be a place for the unexpurgated five-day Test, with its unique emphasis not only on fitness and skill, but on ‘discipline, intelligence and character’. Sadly, there seemed to be little immediate prospect of Pakistan hosting any more Tests themselves after the events of March 2009, when gunmen opened fire on Sri Lanka’s touring team in Lahore, killing eight people, six of them policemen, and putting cricket back on the world’s front pages for all the wrong reasons.
Politically, Imran admitted to being ‘in the wilderness’ after the events of 2007–8. It in no way deterred him. The most significant aspect of his first 18 months as an ex-MP wasn’t so much what he said as the sheer frequency with which he appeared in print or on the air. Imran seems to have been a believer in the theory that providing years of accessibility to influential newsmen is like having money in the bank, allowing the prudent depositor to obtain shelter, or at least a fair hearing, on rainy days. Even for a man not always at his happiest talking to the media, that still held true. None of the lower arts of politics caps the ability to win favourable coverage, and the nation’s former cricket captain was a past master of the art. He was everywhere: enthusing about Barack Obama to a Press Club audience in Paris, whistle-stopping back through America, empathising with victims of the fire that devastated Rawalpindi’s Ghakkan Plaza in December 2008, embracing the Pakistani nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan (alleged, by some, to have sold weapons technology to North Korea), or going door to door on the dusty streets of Peshawar in his latest recruitment drive for the party. As of mid-2009, the Tehreek-e-Insaf had some 26,000 members worldwide and, Imran reiterated, was thus ‘the fastest growing popular movement in Pakistan’. To him, there was a strong correlation between politics and religion, both essentially being about personal liberation. ‘The greatest impact of turning to God for
me was that I lost all fear of human beings … Since this is a transitory world where we prepare for the eternal one, I broke out of the self-imposed prisons such as the phobia of growing old, materialism, ego, what people say and so on … Faith frees you, it drives away your fears — fear of dying, fear of losing your wealth, fear of humiliation; all of that goes … God willing, everything passes. We will prevail …’
The words were vintage Imran, even if, to some, they had lost the kind of power they once had. He’d connected millions of Pakistanis with a common political language — the key word being justice, both for themselves and the nation — but after 13 years he seemed to be repeating himself, as was the case in a year’s end speech he gave to party workers on 27 December 2008. The Tehreek-e-Insaf would become a major political force ‘within the next six months’, Imran insisted, before roundly condemning the ‘base’ Zardari administration, much as he had its predecessor, for ‘enslaving the judiciary’. Nor was the goal of Pakistani economic self-sufficiency any closer to hand than it had been under Musharraf. In the spring of 2009, Zardari was seeking oil concessions from Saudi Arabia, a £2 billion loan from the World Bank and the IMF, and a £500 million credit line from Britain’s Department for Overseas Development. Indeed, no international capital reserve seemed entirely free of Pakistan’s attention, at a time when their head of state enjoyed a personal fortune estimated at between £2.5 billion and £6 billion.
This should have been the moment for a figure of national unity to emerge. But Imran’s political balancing act — giving rein to a consistent and obviously deep-felt moral disgust with the rhetoric of power, while going out of his way to assure Western leaders, journalists and financial benefactors that he was a man they could do business with — appeared to be only partly successful. He couldn’t seem to entirely satisfy either world. Imran remained a much treasured national icon, but one who was also apparently destined to be one of those essential voices of dissent primarily heard from the political sidelines. A stubborn man by nature, he was, perhaps, well suited to play the role of a sort of ‘bouffant prophet’, to quote one former cricket colleague (which, again, is in no way to deny his unwavering sincerity and devotion to the cause), booming down his twin messages of imminent disaster for the elites, and popular vindication for the party, from his hilltop eyrie. ‘I have absolutely no doubt that we will succeed in either the next election — or the next election after that,’ Imran again declared in 2009. An interviewer from the Independent asked him if he was looking for another wife to stand by him in the long struggle. ‘Not really,’ Imran said. ‘No. The main reason which affected my [first] marriage was my political life and commitments. Couldn’t give it enough time. I am so overstretched … So a wife is not something that is on my agenda right now. Whether it will ever be … I don’t even know that.’
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