Kabira
BANNED
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2014
- Messages
- 14,383
- Reaction score
- -20
- Country
- Location
Against all expectations, the former playboy and British tabloid celebrity now has the backing of the Taliban.
Imran Khan. Picture: Finlay Mackay/trunkarchive.com/Snapper Media
Imran Khan, the Oxford-educated former playboy cricketer, is roaring along the Pakistani campaign trail in his armoured car. Horns honk. Crowds yell. Superfans on motorbikes race after him. Thousands line the road with his flags in the small Punjabi city of Mandi Bahauddin. There is a thud on the roof. Supporters are leaping onto the Khan-mobile.
But when it comes to adulation, the man who captained Pakistan to victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup has seen it all. Dressed in an immaculate white flowing shalwar kameez, nodding in satisfaction at the human tide, Khan is moments from addressing a rally. We have just driven 3½ hours from the capital, Islamabad, knackered donkeys and dishevelled villagers clipping past the window. All the while, he’s been talking about everything from God to his two sons from his former marriage to British heiress Jemima Goldsmith and his halcyon days at Keble College, Oxford. How things have changed. “British politics,” he intones. “It’s such a boring politics. If I had to be in British politics, after two months I would just … commit suicide.”
“Pakistani politics,” he adds, smiling, “now this is such exciting politics.”
Against all expectations, the former paparazzi pin-up who once posed for a portrait in his briefs has emerged as the man both the Taliban and many in the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful and feared spy agency, would like to see installed as the country’s next leader. After 22 years of trying, and failing so badly he became a national joke — one newspaper ran a satirical column in his honour titled “Im the Dim” — Khan, at 65, has his best shot yet at becoming prime minister. Some aides whisper this may well be his last, as he leads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party he founded in 1996 into a fraught general election to be held this July. “People laughed at me,” he frowns, as if imagining their sullen faces no longer finding “Dimran” so funny now. “But I always thought I’d win.” This, he explains, is the Imran Khan mindset. “Whatever happens, I’ll win. OK?”
Pounding his enemies, talking about winning, winning, winning, Khan reminds me of Donald Trump — and, despite his visceral loathing of the US president, whom he has labelled “ignorant and ungrateful”, it’s hard not to compare the two. Khan, like Trump, emerged from the moneyed elite, riding high on a personality cult, purporting to be the voice of every forgotten man, railing against effete liberals and the corruption and nepotism of the political class. And just like Trump he is accused of sexual harassment. Khan is the subject of a Pakistani #MeToo claim. His prayer beads flick faster and faster at the mention of his accuser, Ayesha Gulalai Wazir, an MP from his own party, who alleges he sent her “inappropriate” text messages and has called for a parliamentary investigation. Safe in his armoured car, armed guards riding in the pick-up truck ahead, Khan rubbishes her claims: “She’s been paid for that.” He accuses his enemies of smearing him with — guess what? Fake news. “You see what I have to put up with?”
His critics, meanwhile, denounce him as a fornicator who has never moved on from his playboy past. Author Salman Rushdie has warned he is a “dictator in waiting”. But he is no westernised darling. Pakistanis who are the most like Khan — the English-speaking, Dubai-tripping, high-tea-drinking upper classes — are also those who are the most suspicious of him. The feeling is mutual. Khan attacks “liberals” who support NATO’s war on the Taliban as “thirsty for blood”. “They have absolutely no idea. They sit in the drawing room, they read the English-language newspapers, which bear very little resemblance to what is real Pakistan. I promise you, they’d be lost in our villages.”
Waiting to be summoned by Khan in Islamabad, I was introduced to the nickname liberals have for him — Taliban Khan. They are only half-joking. The Taliban, he has gone as far to demand, should be allowed to open offices in Pakistani cities. “American drone strikes in Pakistan must stop,” he tells me. “It’s butchery, and the true horror of it is hidden from the West.”
The man who was once married to the daughter of a Jewish billionaire now accuses Israel of “controlling the United States” and US aid of “enslaving” Pakistan. “We shouldn’t be fighting other people’s wars,” he says. “Pakistan must exit the so-called war on terror.” This is his mantra.
Who is to blame for the state in which Pakistan finds itself? Khan points the finger at the US. “They pushed us into a hysteria of bloodletting.” He blames the US for the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, allies of the Afghan Taliban and, like them, a ruthless, fundamentalist, ethnic Pashtun terrorist group that has repeatedly slaughtered Pakistani civilians. Khan was born into a wealthy Pashtun family in Lahore and never fails to speak romantically about this nearly 50 million-strong “uncolonised” ethnic group.
“We ended up sending our army into our [semi-autonomous] tribal areas at the request of the Americans. And our areas got devastated. We had, more or less, a civil-war situation there,” he snarls. “The aid was minuscule compared to the loss of billions and the blood our country spilt.”
Imran Khan with Pashtun tribesmen. Picture: Paul Massey/Australscope
In 2014 the Pakistani Taliban announced that Khan should represent them in negotiations with the government. “All terrorism is politics,” he says. “There’s no such thing as religious terrorism. It’s politics behind it. The political injustice. Perceived injustice is why people pick up arms — throughout history.” He says he is against all terrorism. “My tradition is of a more Sufi style of Islam,” he explains, a mystical path very different from the Taliban’s literalism.
As prime minister, would Khan break military ties and supply lines with Washington? Grinning at the crowds, he ignores the question and begins Trump-bashing instead. “He’s so boring. He’s so predictable … he’s a purely materialistic being. Whatever option makes the most money is the one he wants. He has no spiritual dimension at all.” Khan turns to me: “I wouldn’t even be in politics if I hadn’t turned towards spirituality.”
Khan may feel at liberty to lash out at the US, but he is terse to the point of monosyllabic on the China of Xi Jinping, who is pouring $62 billion into Pakistani infrastructure. This dwarfs the $33 billion that Trump tweeted the US had “foolishly” handed over to Pakistan before withholding $900 million in military aid recently. Beijing, for Pakistani generals, is the new Washington.
At these rallies, Khan keeps promising to “bring the China model to Pakistan” to fight poverty. But in the car he is unable to explain to me what this means beyond: “We have a lot to learn from what they did with industry.” So what is his overall plan? First, “a sovereign foreign policy”. Second, “an Islamic welfare state”. Third, “the China model”. Can he give me any details? His eyes glaze over. Even close aides admit the boss is not great at this. “He’s not a strategy guy, let’s put it that way,” says Asad Umar, vice-president of Khan’s party. “He has never been in an institution, and doesn’t know how to work in an institutional setting.”
Khan’s enemies in Islamabad insist he is purely a spoiler, boosted by Pakistan’s shadowy state within a state — the network of military elites, vested interests and the Inter-Services Intelligence, which has routinely toppled governments and run the country to its designs. What does Khan say to the accusation he is the military’s man? “What is it that the military is doing wrong that I have backed?” he snaps. Left a little uneasy at how firmly Khan shuts the question down, I try another approach. Is the military corrupt? “The military depends on the head of the military,” says Khan. “He is, in my opinion, the best head of the military we have ever had. He’s a really good guy.” This is exactly how Khan appears on TV: willing to castigate everyone, apart from Pakistan’s security men.
Worrying his prayer beads again, Khan is getting in the zone for his speech. The car crawls through a forest of reaching hands and phones. “This is not normal, what’s happening,” he says, surveying the throng contentedly. “It’s one of those moments that only happens once or twice a century, when the people mobilise.” If he can win in Punjab, a stronghold of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N party, he can win outright. Outside the bulletproof windows, a stadium of 20,000 looms, and a sudden whimsy returns. “Staying in England would’ve been easy,” he sighs. “I could have done some cricket writing and made a decent living. But life would have been over.”
I first met Khan at his residence fit for a Bond villain outside Islamabad, where the walls are covered with ceremonial swords, cricket memorabilia and photos of him as a young man. I told him I’d spotted him two days earlier, in a hotel lobby in Karachi, being mobbed while he was trying to eat a piece of sushi. “Well, don’t forget,” he said when I asked how it felt to live like that, “I’m probably the most known Pakistani ever in its history.”
Once upon a time, Khan was a nobody. There were no fans to greet the teenager who arrived alone into the English gloom in 1971. “That was the toughest winter of my life,” he recalls. His one-way ticket from Lahore was to play for Worcestershire County Cricket Club on a £4-a-month contract and, as he had promised his father, finish his education at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester. He’d not only left behind Lahore, where his mother’s family were known as the godfathers of Lahore Cricket Club, but also a childhood spent making his four servants bat as he practised his bowling, and his social standing as a student at the city’s blue-chip Aitchison College.
Struggling to make friends at the Royal Grammar School, he mostly ate alone. “I was shy,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe it, but I was terribly shy.” Other boys remember a quiet loner wrapped in scarfs with no girlfriends. “I grew up thinking I was ugly,” Khan says. “My older sister always told me, and I accepted it in the end.” He insists he was never complimented on his looks before his success. “Success can make even the ugliest man good-looking.”
Khan with Jemima Goldsmith on their wedding day. Picture: Sean Dempsey/PA Images via Getty Images
Oxford reinvented Khan. He became a socialite, somebody whose exotic looks could seduce the elite. Where he had felt alienated from the Wisden-obsessed cricketers at Worcester, he fell in love with his Oxford Blues team. “I never had that friendship again,” he says. Uni friends remember him as a hit with the ladies. “Girls would call just one after the other,” says one. But it didn’t feel easy to him. “I kept questioning my identity at Oxford,” Khan tells me. “And I began to see a lot of self-loathing in the [Pakistani] boys from my own school when I’d meet them in London.”
Pride, shame, inferiority: a mix of emotions that left him wanting not only to win, but to trash the English and Australian cricketers who seemed unbeatable in the 1970s. “The colonial period was so close then,” he says. But there was something else driving him. Fame. He remembers wondering at Oxford what it would be like to be pop star famous, “like Mick Jagger or David Bowie”. He was about to find out. His skill as a fast bowler and master of reverse swing led to a successful cricket career — he took 362 Test wickets and became captain of the Pakistan team in 1982 — and when he and his team returned as World Cup victors in 1992, the throngs in Lahore were so intense, the adulation so extreme, it took them several hours to reach the city from the airport.
Imran Khan celebrates Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup win. Picture: Getty Images
Driving today around the villas of Zaman Park in Lahore where Khan grew up, a void quickly becomes apparent: he has demolished the house that belonged to his father, who died in 2008. He lost his mother to cancer in 1985, and built a hospital in Lahore in her honour. He summarily dismissed his father from being the guardian of her memory as the chairman of the hospital board. Family members told me that his father’s infidelities were the cause of the rift, and for periods they were not even on speaking terms. “I had a very formal relationship with my father,” says Khan.
What about his own sons? “I think I have to give credit to Jemima. She has been a tremendous mother to them. Because, you know, when we divorced and she returned with them to England, then I only became a part-time father.”
Khan may have now completely abandoned western dress, but he says his sons Sulaiman, 21, and Qasim, 18, were brought up “in a bi-culture”. Both attended the exclusive Harrodian School in London. “All the holidays they would come and spend with me,” he says. “But still it wasn’t the same as living with them. So I consider myself lucky in a sense: when they would come here, I would just drop everything and have quality time with them. But then they grew up.” When I ask if they drink alcohol, he does not answer — instead pivoting into bashing Pakistani “westoxified” elites.
Inside the stadium, Khan thunders against Pakistan’s ruling party as Chinese-made TV drones whiz overhead. “These are not politicians. They are the mafia! They have penetrated every institution. This is what I am up against.” The crowd roars and begins to chant for him in Urdu.
Khan’s speech over, we are back in the car in minutes. He is pumped, hungry. We pull up at a truckers’ pit stop. “It’s just the best Pakistani food,” says Khan. No sooner is he out of the car than the screaming starts and his guards hold back another stampede. “You must try this,” he says, pointing at dishes brought in by panicked waiters. Hundreds of people are now pressing in for selfies as Khan propounds that the worst curse of British imperialism was to create an English-speaking elite isolated from the people. A man behind me is screaming, “Sultan Khan! Sultan Khan!” What’s he trying to say, I ask. “Oh, I don’t know,” says Khan, looking away, as if ever so slightly embarrassed.
Over and over he rages at “the mafias” — the politicians who keep beating him. But the more he lays into the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N party, run by the family of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Pakistan People’s Party, controlled by former president Asif Ali Zardari (husband of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto), the more I realise how personal all this is. Because they’re all faces of the same tiny elite: Khan knew Bhutto at Oxford, played cricket with Sharif in Lahore. “Yes, it is personal,” he says. “Because I thought, ‘Both of them are well off, how could they not care about what’s happening to society?’”
Behind everything, there is something I find deeply aristocratic, almost feudal, about Khan. His sense of order, hierarchy and noblesse oblige. Yet the longer I spend with him, the more estranged he seems from Imran Khan the tabloid celeb. Something melancholic creeps over him as I ask about the 1980s, the girlfriends, the parties. He sighs. “I hardly remember anything. You know, I’ve got amnesia. I just forget all my past.”
For a moment he stares ahead, and then he blurts out: “If I look at my life, I would have led it differently. If I had to lead it again, it’s not that I have regrets — you know, you learn from life … it’s just that I didn’t want to get married, because international cricket and marriage never went together.” Why? Most men would kill for that life. “Yeah, but you know what glitters is not gold. It looks from the outside very glamorous, great, but actually it’s not. It’s these transitory relationships. They’re pretty empty. You have short-term excitement, but in the long term it causes hurt and pain, which I don’t like. When I look back I don’t think it’s worth it. You know, this is how women get used, because they hope in the relationship to make the man fall in love with them and the man just uses them. It’s wrong.” The more we talk, the more I feel he loathes the “westoxified” man he used to be. Parties? “I was bored with parties even in my cricketing days.” What about cricket? “Once I finished I never wanted to play again.”
He talks about how he found God. “There was this sufi who actually did change my life,” he says. “This is how I was living before. I would reach a milestone — I’m talking about cricket now — and I would think, ‘This is great.’ But then I’d think, ‘No, there’s something still missing.’ And this feeling I was looking for, I couldn’t work out what it was.”
This is the Khan who last month unexpectedly proposed to his faith healer, Bushra Maneka, 50. The Khan for whom something is always missing. On Twitter he asked his supporters to “pray I find personal happiness, which, except for a few years, I have been deprived of”. This sudden (some say reckless) move has horrified his operatives.
How many times have you been in love? I ask. “Oh,” he says, touching his chin, “I guess, tw … actually I’d rather not play that ball.”
This is the Khan that his old friends recognise: emotional, questing, believing. I ask one of his oldest friends from Lahore, the sensitive and literary socialite Nusrat Jamil, how we might reconcile Khan the anti-western populist politician with Khan the former playboy.
“He’s not liberal, intellectually,” says Jamil. “He may have had girlfriends, but that doesn’t make him liberal. He’s not a person who thinks in terms of a secular society, who thinks in terms of secularism and democracy. He thinks in terms of a Muslim way of living, a Muslim way of life, and that’s how he would like to live his life. That’s how he would like to run the country.”
- By BEN JUDAH
- From The Weekend Australian Magazine
- February 17th, 2018
Imran Khan. Picture: Finlay Mackay/trunkarchive.com/Snapper Media
Imran Khan, the Oxford-educated former playboy cricketer, is roaring along the Pakistani campaign trail in his armoured car. Horns honk. Crowds yell. Superfans on motorbikes race after him. Thousands line the road with his flags in the small Punjabi city of Mandi Bahauddin. There is a thud on the roof. Supporters are leaping onto the Khan-mobile.
But when it comes to adulation, the man who captained Pakistan to victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup has seen it all. Dressed in an immaculate white flowing shalwar kameez, nodding in satisfaction at the human tide, Khan is moments from addressing a rally. We have just driven 3½ hours from the capital, Islamabad, knackered donkeys and dishevelled villagers clipping past the window. All the while, he’s been talking about everything from God to his two sons from his former marriage to British heiress Jemima Goldsmith and his halcyon days at Keble College, Oxford. How things have changed. “British politics,” he intones. “It’s such a boring politics. If I had to be in British politics, after two months I would just … commit suicide.”
“Pakistani politics,” he adds, smiling, “now this is such exciting politics.”
Against all expectations, the former paparazzi pin-up who once posed for a portrait in his briefs has emerged as the man both the Taliban and many in the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful and feared spy agency, would like to see installed as the country’s next leader. After 22 years of trying, and failing so badly he became a national joke — one newspaper ran a satirical column in his honour titled “Im the Dim” — Khan, at 65, has his best shot yet at becoming prime minister. Some aides whisper this may well be his last, as he leads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party he founded in 1996 into a fraught general election to be held this July. “People laughed at me,” he frowns, as if imagining their sullen faces no longer finding “Dimran” so funny now. “But I always thought I’d win.” This, he explains, is the Imran Khan mindset. “Whatever happens, I’ll win. OK?”
Pounding his enemies, talking about winning, winning, winning, Khan reminds me of Donald Trump — and, despite his visceral loathing of the US president, whom he has labelled “ignorant and ungrateful”, it’s hard not to compare the two. Khan, like Trump, emerged from the moneyed elite, riding high on a personality cult, purporting to be the voice of every forgotten man, railing against effete liberals and the corruption and nepotism of the political class. And just like Trump he is accused of sexual harassment. Khan is the subject of a Pakistani #MeToo claim. His prayer beads flick faster and faster at the mention of his accuser, Ayesha Gulalai Wazir, an MP from his own party, who alleges he sent her “inappropriate” text messages and has called for a parliamentary investigation. Safe in his armoured car, armed guards riding in the pick-up truck ahead, Khan rubbishes her claims: “She’s been paid for that.” He accuses his enemies of smearing him with — guess what? Fake news. “You see what I have to put up with?”
His critics, meanwhile, denounce him as a fornicator who has never moved on from his playboy past. Author Salman Rushdie has warned he is a “dictator in waiting”. But he is no westernised darling. Pakistanis who are the most like Khan — the English-speaking, Dubai-tripping, high-tea-drinking upper classes — are also those who are the most suspicious of him. The feeling is mutual. Khan attacks “liberals” who support NATO’s war on the Taliban as “thirsty for blood”. “They have absolutely no idea. They sit in the drawing room, they read the English-language newspapers, which bear very little resemblance to what is real Pakistan. I promise you, they’d be lost in our villages.”
Waiting to be summoned by Khan in Islamabad, I was introduced to the nickname liberals have for him — Taliban Khan. They are only half-joking. The Taliban, he has gone as far to demand, should be allowed to open offices in Pakistani cities. “American drone strikes in Pakistan must stop,” he tells me. “It’s butchery, and the true horror of it is hidden from the West.”
The man who was once married to the daughter of a Jewish billionaire now accuses Israel of “controlling the United States” and US aid of “enslaving” Pakistan. “We shouldn’t be fighting other people’s wars,” he says. “Pakistan must exit the so-called war on terror.” This is his mantra.
Who is to blame for the state in which Pakistan finds itself? Khan points the finger at the US. “They pushed us into a hysteria of bloodletting.” He blames the US for the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, allies of the Afghan Taliban and, like them, a ruthless, fundamentalist, ethnic Pashtun terrorist group that has repeatedly slaughtered Pakistani civilians. Khan was born into a wealthy Pashtun family in Lahore and never fails to speak romantically about this nearly 50 million-strong “uncolonised” ethnic group.
“We ended up sending our army into our [semi-autonomous] tribal areas at the request of the Americans. And our areas got devastated. We had, more or less, a civil-war situation there,” he snarls. “The aid was minuscule compared to the loss of billions and the blood our country spilt.”
Imran Khan with Pashtun tribesmen. Picture: Paul Massey/Australscope
In 2014 the Pakistani Taliban announced that Khan should represent them in negotiations with the government. “All terrorism is politics,” he says. “There’s no such thing as religious terrorism. It’s politics behind it. The political injustice. Perceived injustice is why people pick up arms — throughout history.” He says he is against all terrorism. “My tradition is of a more Sufi style of Islam,” he explains, a mystical path very different from the Taliban’s literalism.
As prime minister, would Khan break military ties and supply lines with Washington? Grinning at the crowds, he ignores the question and begins Trump-bashing instead. “He’s so boring. He’s so predictable … he’s a purely materialistic being. Whatever option makes the most money is the one he wants. He has no spiritual dimension at all.” Khan turns to me: “I wouldn’t even be in politics if I hadn’t turned towards spirituality.”
Khan may feel at liberty to lash out at the US, but he is terse to the point of monosyllabic on the China of Xi Jinping, who is pouring $62 billion into Pakistani infrastructure. This dwarfs the $33 billion that Trump tweeted the US had “foolishly” handed over to Pakistan before withholding $900 million in military aid recently. Beijing, for Pakistani generals, is the new Washington.
At these rallies, Khan keeps promising to “bring the China model to Pakistan” to fight poverty. But in the car he is unable to explain to me what this means beyond: “We have a lot to learn from what they did with industry.” So what is his overall plan? First, “a sovereign foreign policy”. Second, “an Islamic welfare state”. Third, “the China model”. Can he give me any details? His eyes glaze over. Even close aides admit the boss is not great at this. “He’s not a strategy guy, let’s put it that way,” says Asad Umar, vice-president of Khan’s party. “He has never been in an institution, and doesn’t know how to work in an institutional setting.”
Khan’s enemies in Islamabad insist he is purely a spoiler, boosted by Pakistan’s shadowy state within a state — the network of military elites, vested interests and the Inter-Services Intelligence, which has routinely toppled governments and run the country to its designs. What does Khan say to the accusation he is the military’s man? “What is it that the military is doing wrong that I have backed?” he snaps. Left a little uneasy at how firmly Khan shuts the question down, I try another approach. Is the military corrupt? “The military depends on the head of the military,” says Khan. “He is, in my opinion, the best head of the military we have ever had. He’s a really good guy.” This is exactly how Khan appears on TV: willing to castigate everyone, apart from Pakistan’s security men.
Worrying his prayer beads again, Khan is getting in the zone for his speech. The car crawls through a forest of reaching hands and phones. “This is not normal, what’s happening,” he says, surveying the throng contentedly. “It’s one of those moments that only happens once or twice a century, when the people mobilise.” If he can win in Punjab, a stronghold of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N party, he can win outright. Outside the bulletproof windows, a stadium of 20,000 looms, and a sudden whimsy returns. “Staying in England would’ve been easy,” he sighs. “I could have done some cricket writing and made a decent living. But life would have been over.”
I first met Khan at his residence fit for a Bond villain outside Islamabad, where the walls are covered with ceremonial swords, cricket memorabilia and photos of him as a young man. I told him I’d spotted him two days earlier, in a hotel lobby in Karachi, being mobbed while he was trying to eat a piece of sushi. “Well, don’t forget,” he said when I asked how it felt to live like that, “I’m probably the most known Pakistani ever in its history.”
Once upon a time, Khan was a nobody. There were no fans to greet the teenager who arrived alone into the English gloom in 1971. “That was the toughest winter of my life,” he recalls. His one-way ticket from Lahore was to play for Worcestershire County Cricket Club on a £4-a-month contract and, as he had promised his father, finish his education at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester. He’d not only left behind Lahore, where his mother’s family were known as the godfathers of Lahore Cricket Club, but also a childhood spent making his four servants bat as he practised his bowling, and his social standing as a student at the city’s blue-chip Aitchison College.
Struggling to make friends at the Royal Grammar School, he mostly ate alone. “I was shy,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe it, but I was terribly shy.” Other boys remember a quiet loner wrapped in scarfs with no girlfriends. “I grew up thinking I was ugly,” Khan says. “My older sister always told me, and I accepted it in the end.” He insists he was never complimented on his looks before his success. “Success can make even the ugliest man good-looking.”
Khan with Jemima Goldsmith on their wedding day. Picture: Sean Dempsey/PA Images via Getty Images
Oxford reinvented Khan. He became a socialite, somebody whose exotic looks could seduce the elite. Where he had felt alienated from the Wisden-obsessed cricketers at Worcester, he fell in love with his Oxford Blues team. “I never had that friendship again,” he says. Uni friends remember him as a hit with the ladies. “Girls would call just one after the other,” says one. But it didn’t feel easy to him. “I kept questioning my identity at Oxford,” Khan tells me. “And I began to see a lot of self-loathing in the [Pakistani] boys from my own school when I’d meet them in London.”
Pride, shame, inferiority: a mix of emotions that left him wanting not only to win, but to trash the English and Australian cricketers who seemed unbeatable in the 1970s. “The colonial period was so close then,” he says. But there was something else driving him. Fame. He remembers wondering at Oxford what it would be like to be pop star famous, “like Mick Jagger or David Bowie”. He was about to find out. His skill as a fast bowler and master of reverse swing led to a successful cricket career — he took 362 Test wickets and became captain of the Pakistan team in 1982 — and when he and his team returned as World Cup victors in 1992, the throngs in Lahore were so intense, the adulation so extreme, it took them several hours to reach the city from the airport.
Imran Khan celebrates Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup win. Picture: Getty Images
Driving today around the villas of Zaman Park in Lahore where Khan grew up, a void quickly becomes apparent: he has demolished the house that belonged to his father, who died in 2008. He lost his mother to cancer in 1985, and built a hospital in Lahore in her honour. He summarily dismissed his father from being the guardian of her memory as the chairman of the hospital board. Family members told me that his father’s infidelities were the cause of the rift, and for periods they were not even on speaking terms. “I had a very formal relationship with my father,” says Khan.
What about his own sons? “I think I have to give credit to Jemima. She has been a tremendous mother to them. Because, you know, when we divorced and she returned with them to England, then I only became a part-time father.”
Khan may have now completely abandoned western dress, but he says his sons Sulaiman, 21, and Qasim, 18, were brought up “in a bi-culture”. Both attended the exclusive Harrodian School in London. “All the holidays they would come and spend with me,” he says. “But still it wasn’t the same as living with them. So I consider myself lucky in a sense: when they would come here, I would just drop everything and have quality time with them. But then they grew up.” When I ask if they drink alcohol, he does not answer — instead pivoting into bashing Pakistani “westoxified” elites.
Inside the stadium, Khan thunders against Pakistan’s ruling party as Chinese-made TV drones whiz overhead. “These are not politicians. They are the mafia! They have penetrated every institution. This is what I am up against.” The crowd roars and begins to chant for him in Urdu.
Khan’s speech over, we are back in the car in minutes. He is pumped, hungry. We pull up at a truckers’ pit stop. “It’s just the best Pakistani food,” says Khan. No sooner is he out of the car than the screaming starts and his guards hold back another stampede. “You must try this,” he says, pointing at dishes brought in by panicked waiters. Hundreds of people are now pressing in for selfies as Khan propounds that the worst curse of British imperialism was to create an English-speaking elite isolated from the people. A man behind me is screaming, “Sultan Khan! Sultan Khan!” What’s he trying to say, I ask. “Oh, I don’t know,” says Khan, looking away, as if ever so slightly embarrassed.
Over and over he rages at “the mafias” — the politicians who keep beating him. But the more he lays into the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N party, run by the family of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Pakistan People’s Party, controlled by former president Asif Ali Zardari (husband of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto), the more I realise how personal all this is. Because they’re all faces of the same tiny elite: Khan knew Bhutto at Oxford, played cricket with Sharif in Lahore. “Yes, it is personal,” he says. “Because I thought, ‘Both of them are well off, how could they not care about what’s happening to society?’”
Behind everything, there is something I find deeply aristocratic, almost feudal, about Khan. His sense of order, hierarchy and noblesse oblige. Yet the longer I spend with him, the more estranged he seems from Imran Khan the tabloid celeb. Something melancholic creeps over him as I ask about the 1980s, the girlfriends, the parties. He sighs. “I hardly remember anything. You know, I’ve got amnesia. I just forget all my past.”
For a moment he stares ahead, and then he blurts out: “If I look at my life, I would have led it differently. If I had to lead it again, it’s not that I have regrets — you know, you learn from life … it’s just that I didn’t want to get married, because international cricket and marriage never went together.” Why? Most men would kill for that life. “Yeah, but you know what glitters is not gold. It looks from the outside very glamorous, great, but actually it’s not. It’s these transitory relationships. They’re pretty empty. You have short-term excitement, but in the long term it causes hurt and pain, which I don’t like. When I look back I don’t think it’s worth it. You know, this is how women get used, because they hope in the relationship to make the man fall in love with them and the man just uses them. It’s wrong.” The more we talk, the more I feel he loathes the “westoxified” man he used to be. Parties? “I was bored with parties even in my cricketing days.” What about cricket? “Once I finished I never wanted to play again.”
He talks about how he found God. “There was this sufi who actually did change my life,” he says. “This is how I was living before. I would reach a milestone — I’m talking about cricket now — and I would think, ‘This is great.’ But then I’d think, ‘No, there’s something still missing.’ And this feeling I was looking for, I couldn’t work out what it was.”
This is the Khan who last month unexpectedly proposed to his faith healer, Bushra Maneka, 50. The Khan for whom something is always missing. On Twitter he asked his supporters to “pray I find personal happiness, which, except for a few years, I have been deprived of”. This sudden (some say reckless) move has horrified his operatives.
How many times have you been in love? I ask. “Oh,” he says, touching his chin, “I guess, tw … actually I’d rather not play that ball.”
This is the Khan that his old friends recognise: emotional, questing, believing. I ask one of his oldest friends from Lahore, the sensitive and literary socialite Nusrat Jamil, how we might reconcile Khan the anti-western populist politician with Khan the former playboy.
“He’s not liberal, intellectually,” says Jamil. “He may have had girlfriends, but that doesn’t make him liberal. He’s not a person who thinks in terms of a secular society, who thinks in terms of secularism and democracy. He thinks in terms of a Muslim way of living, a Muslim way of life, and that’s how he would like to live his life. That’s how he would like to run the country.”
