Captain to Captive

When Imran Khan burst onto Pakistan’s political scene towards the end of the last century, after a glittering cricketing career, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Here was a man who, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, did not belong to the country’s traditional, corrupt political dynasties and was widely regarded as honest and clean. On top of that, he had the charisma and ambition to make a genuine contribution to his country. Many saw him as a Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore in the making, a comparison that carried even more weight when he won his first election. The party he launched, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), gained instant popularity, more because of his charisma than because of its long-term welfare programme or development agenda.

Thereafter, following Maulana Tahir-ul-Qadri’s container-mounted agitation, Imran Khan launched a marathon protest in the same vein, directing his invective at the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. This thrust him squarely into the seething cauldron of Pakistani political agitation. The container-mounted protest, buoyed by massive public support stemming from his personal popularity and aided by a wink and a nod from the so-called Establishment, including the judiciary’s passive support, was instrumental in the departure of PM Nawaz Sharif. The general elections that followed gave Khan a majority, bolstered by the avowed, esoteric indulgence of his newly acquired wife, and installed him in the Prime Minister’s House in August 2018. This sudden success led his psychopathic followers to try to launch him as a visionary.

Even though this was a meteoric rise for Imran Khan and a prelude to a successful political career, the general trend in domestic politics soon reasserted itself—Pakistan being fertile ground for authoritarian politics, no matter who wins the elections. From the very start, Khan’s performance in office was directed less at governing than at undermining his political opponent, Nawaz Sharif, and building bridges with the military establishment. This was evident in his agreement to grant General Bajwa an extension of service soon after taking office, rather than pursuing anything concrete for the welfare of the masses, despite his religiously inspired vision of transforming Pakistan into a model Riasat-e-Madina.

However, soon Khan’s immense sense of pride and often brash comments about major world powers’ stalwarts and the Army’s higher command landed him in trouble, and as a result he was forced to face a no-confidence motion in the Parliament, resulting in his being removed from his position as the Prime Minister. Thereafter, his party resorted to political agitation, but being convinced that its downfall was due to direct interference of the Military Establishment, it took a leaf out of Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s way of dealing with the Army and opted to give the green signal to its stalwarts to vandalise some important installations of the Army on 9th May, imagining that, as in Türkiye, he too would be able to initiate a movement within the Army itself, little realising that there is a vast difference between the profile of the Pakistan Army and the Turkish Army. Since then, Imran Khan has lived to rue the day of 9th May.

This brief summary of Imran Khan’s political career demonstrates that although he had genuinely begun to see himself as a visionary, he was no visionary at all—he lacked the foresight that separates a true visionary from one who merely aspires to be one. This became all the more apparent when his party launched protest movements across the country, beginning in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and extending into Punjab’s cities and, of course, the capital, Islamabad—often culminating in violence.

This was, in fact, a crucial mistake. Instead of settling for a compromise with the ruling parties—the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)—and thereby persuading them to call general elections, in which his personal popularity would have given him more than an average chance of success, he opted for confrontation with both of his nemeses, in uniform and out. Unfortunately, the method of confrontation he chose relied on violence and on social media to spread half-truths across the country, often bordering on outright abuse. The violence took the shape of long marches to Islamabad, through which he believed he could bring about a revolution—without realising that gathering crowds is a double-edged sword: while it puts pressure on the sitting government, it also destabilises the country economically and inconveniences ordinary citizens, who then grow disenchanted with those responsible for the agitation.

Imran Khan himself went to jail on corruption charges—the result of several misjudgments, the weakness of his party machine, and infighting among its members. While in jail, instead of striking a deal with the ruling parties that would have allowed him to maintain his political presence, he allowed his persona to be built up by his psychopathic followers to the point where he personified the party he led. He cultivated a personality cult so complete that nothing could happen without his approval or consent. His followers began to cast him in the mould of Mao or Lenin, without realising that his obvious charisma was no substitute for the intellect those luminaries commanded—something he has failed to display despite spending many years in the political quagmire of Pakistani politics.