Khan won popular support when he became prime minister in 2018
His name may not appear on the ballot, but as Pakistan goes to the polls this week, Imran Khan will be at the center of the nation’s attention, and observers say the election will be seriously flawed without his participation. defect.
The former international cricket star was sentenced to three long-term jail terms in less than a week and banned from politics for ten years – officially excluding him from an election that he was seemingly never allowed to contest.
Khan enjoyed popular support when he became prime minister in 2018, but he fell out with the military establishment that fostered his rise and was ousted in a vote of no confidence in April 2022.
He subsequently launched a dangerous and unprecedented campaign against the army, but the final straw last May came when his supporters smashed the headquarters of an army commander following his first arrest. A straw.
He was detained again and has since faced nearly 200 court proceedings against charges he insists were trumped up to distance him from politics.
His party says Khan, who has been convicted of treason, corruption and violating Islamic law by having a third marriage, is at the center of a character assassination as those in power seek to curb his popularity.
Bushra Bibi, a faith healer who rarely appears in public, married former playboy Khan shortly after he became his spiritual mentor before he was elected in 2018.
Along with Khan, she was found guilty of corruption and failing to comply with “iddat” rules, which require divorced women to wait three months before remarrying in order to find out who the father is if she becomes pregnant.
Down but not out? –
The political career of the charismatic 71-year-old could easily be wiped out after his party was jailed and hit hard by the military establishment in Thursday’s vote.
Khan has won cricket matches in the unlikely position of captaining his country, while Pakistan has seen dozens of politicians sentenced to long prison terms only to have their sentences overturned when they came back into favor.
Khan remains popular, but without him at the helm, the fate of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) he founded is uncertain.
The performance of PTI candidates this week – who had to contest as independents after the party was stripped of its cricket bat symbol – could be a clue as to how long Khan will stay behind bars.
Millions of people who grew up watching him play cricket voted for him, where he excelled and led the country to the 1992 World Cup.
The PTI overthrew decades of dominance by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), two usually feuding groups who joined forces to oust him.
Khan envisioned Pakistan as a welfare state modeled on the Islamic Golden Age of the seventh to fourteenth centuries, a period of cultural, economic and scientific prosperity in the Muslim world.
But he has made little progress in improving Pakistan’s fiscal position, with inflation soaring, debt seriously worsening and a weak rupee undermining economic reforms.
He also went after his political opponents, and many prominent PPP and Muslim League-North leaders were jailed for corruption during his tenure.
Some, including election front-runner Nawaz Sharif, have been released or had cases against them disappeared after Khan stepped down.
Human rights groups have condemned a crackdown on media freedom under his rule, and TV news channels have been unofficially banned from broadcasting the views of his opponents.
Now, the tables have turned, and he faces many of the same constraints.
But the key blow to his tenure as prime minister was his feud with the military, the country’s kingmaker that controls the rise and fall of governments.
Tiptoe into politics
The son of a wealthy Lahore family and educated at Oxford, Khan had a reputation as a playboy before retiring from international cricket.
Over the years, he kept busy with philanthropic projects, raising millions of dollars to build a cancer hospital in memory of his mother.
He entered politics cautiously and held the PTI’s only parliamentary seat for many years.
The party grew during the military government of General Pervez Musharraf and the subsequent civilian government, becoming a force in the 2013 elections and winning a majority five years later.
Khan is often described as impulsive and arrogant, and he often uses cricket analogies to describe his political struggles.
“I will fight until the last ball,” he said in a television interview.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Follow us on Google news ,Twitter , and Join Whatsapp Group of thelocalreport.in
