Seldom has been such huge crowds seen after midnight to listen to any leader. But Imran Khan to them, is different. Men, women, teenagers and old fellows all seemed admant to listen to their leader, a leader who is not a looter, a cheat, a person who hoodwinked the masses, a man who used to have bouncer like aides, or someone who swindled millions of dollars of the masses, or even who is on a bail from some court of law.
“It was such a festive atmosphere, There were people from all walks of life—society aunties, groups of boys and girls together. People were pressed on people, but there was no pushing, no shoving. Everyone was really respectful.” The event confirmed as everyone present in the meting of Khan’s political groupie.
Khan writes in his autobiography, “a battle to right colonial wrongs and assert our equality was played out on the cricket field every time we took on England.”
Into this gladiatorial arena, shirt open, eyes bedroom-y, hair long and tousled, stepped Khan. He was one of those rare figures, like Muhammad Ali, who emerge once a generation on the frontier of sport, sex, and politics. Arrestingly handsome and Oxford-educated, albeit with a third-class degree, Khan found the doors of the British aristocracy thrown open to him. Mark Shand, the brother of Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall, was among his best friends; he was seen out on the town with Jerry Hall and Goldie Hawn;
Khan, both as candidate and prime minister, sounds like populists everywhere, now inveighing against Westernized “dollar-addicted” elites, now promising to fix the problems of one of South Asia’s slowest-growing economies by bringing home magical amounts of black money squirreled away in foreign bank accounts. But as much as his rhetoric resembles that of other populists—from Narendra Modi next door in India, to Erdogan in Turkey and Bolsonaro in Brazil—there is one important difference: Khan is a pure sportsman.
Unlike other populists in the developing world, Khan is a man guessing at the passions of people he does not actually represent. Like Trump or the Brexiteers, he underwent a Damascene conversion, which, as he wrote, caused him to turn his back on “brown sahib culture” and throw in his lot with the “real Pakistan.”
The man after whom the airport in Lahore is named was easily the single greatest influence in Khan’s transformation from louche fixture of the demimonde to political revolutionary. Sir Muhammad Iqbal,
What seems to have struck Khan hardest about Iqbal’s philosophy was his idea of khudi, or selfhood, which Khan understood to mean “self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence.” It was precisely what Pakistan needed, Khan thought, to banish the shame of colonial rule and to regain its sense of self. It would also, he believed, armor Pakistan against its own elites, whose “slavish” imitation of Western culture had instilled in them a “self-loathing that stemmed from an ingrained inferiority complex.”
“An emotion that he feels very strongly about is that we should stop feeling enslaved to the West mentally,” said Ali Zafar, Khan’s friend and Pakistan’s biggest pop star. “He feels that since he’s gone there—he’s been there and done that—he knows the West more than anybody else over here. He’s telling them, ‘Look, you’ve got to find your own space, your own identity, your own thing, your own culture, your own roots.’ ”
Khan has a commanding presence. He fills a room and has a tendency to speak at people, rather than to them; never was there a greater mansplained. What he lacks in intelligence, however, he makes up for in intensity, vigor, and what feels almost like a kind of nobility. As Wasim Akram—Khan’s protégé and his successor as captain of the Pakistan team—said to me in Karachi, “There are two types of people, the followers and the leaders. And he is definitely a leader.
Reham Khan is on records of Vanity Fair Magazine saying, “He doesn’t have intelligence of economic principles. He doesn’t have academic intelligence. But he’s very street, so he figures you out.” Like his coeval in the White House, Khan has been reading people all his life—on and off the field. This knowing quality, combined with the raw glamour of vintage fame, creates a palpable tension in his presence. The air bristles; oxygen levels crash. The line is taut, if no longer with sex appeal, then its closest substitute: massive celebrity.
Here he is, trying to play a very difficult game,” Salman Rushdie said of Khan at a panel I chaired in Delhi in 2012. (Khan, the chief guest, had withdrawn in protest upon hearing that the author of The Satanic Verses would be present.) Khan, Rushdie said, was “placating the mullahs on one hand, cozying up to the army on the other, while trying to present himself to the West as the modernizing face of Pakistan.” He added acidly, “I’d concentrate on that, Imran. Try and keep those balls in the air. It’s not going to be easy.”
He faults reformers, such as Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, for falsely believing that “by imposing the outward manifestations of Westernization they could catapult their countries forward by decades.”
Farhan Virk, a young medical student, was there for the dharna days. One night, in August 2014, there was a crackdown against the protesters. “In front of my eyes,” Virk told me via Skype, “the government was firing tear-gas shells and rubber bullets.” Most of the protesters managed to flee. “But Imran Khan, who was merely a cricketer, was still standing there,” Virk recalled. “I thought, if under these terrible conditions, he can remain here, then it really means something.” Finding himself “radicalized” by the crackdown, and by Khan’s display of personal courage, Virk became a yuthiya—one of the rabid Khan supporters, active on social media, who are roughly comparable to Trump’s army of internet trolls.
In 1981, Naipaul wrote of Pakistan, “The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith.” Now, almost 40 years later, Imran Khan is once again making the case for a society founded on the principles of the Koran
