On a cool evening in March, Imran Khan, followed by his dogs, walked
around the extensive lawns of his estate, sniffling with an incipient
cold. "My ex-wife, Jemima, designed the house - it is really paradise
for me," Khan said of the villa, which sprawls on a ridge overlooking
Himalayan foothills and Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. "My greatest
regret is that she is not here to enjoy it," he added, unexpectedly
poignantly. We walked through the living room and then sat in his dimly
lighted bedroom, the voices of servants echoing in the empty house, the
mournful azans drifting up from multiple mosques in the city below.
Khan,
once Pakistan's greatest sportsman and now its most popular politician
since Benazir Bhutto, exuded an Olympian solitude that evening; it had
been a long day, he explained, of meetings with his party's senior
leaders. The previous two months, he said, had been the most difficult
in his life. His party was expanding amazingly fast and attracting
"electables" - experienced men from the governing and main opposition
parties. But the young people who constituted his base wanted change;
they did not want to see old political faces. "I was being pulled apart
in different directions," Khan said. "I thought I was going mad."
Khan's
granitic handsomeness, which first glamorized international cricket and
has sustained the British media's long fascination with his public and
private lives, is now, as he nears 60, a bit craggy. There are lines and
dark patches around his eyes. The stylishly barbered hair, thinning at
the top, is flecked with gray, and his unmodulated baritone, ubiquitous
across Pakistan's TV channels, can sound irritably didactic.
"The public contact is never easy for me," he said. "I am basically a private person."
The
moment of melancholy confession passed. Leaning forward in the dark,
his hands chopping the air for emphasis, Khan unleashed a flood of
strong, often angrily righteous, opinions about secularism, Islam,
women's rights and Salman Rushdie.
That month he had canceled
his participation at a conference in New Delhi where Rushdie was
expected, citing the offense caused by "The Satanic Verses" to Muslims
worldwide. Rushdie, in turn, suggested Khan was a "dictator in waiting,"
comparing his looks with those of Libya's former dictator, Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi.
"What is he talking about? What is he talking
about?" Khan started, "I always hated his writing. He always sees the
ugly side of things. He is - what is the word Jews use? - a
'self-hating' Muslim.
"Why can't the West understand? When I
first went to England, I was shocked to see the depiction of
Christianity in Monty Python's 'Life of Brian.' This is their way. But
for us Muslims, the holy Koran and the prophet, peace be upon him, are
sacred. Why can't the West accept that we have different ways of looking
at our religions?
"Anyway," Khan said in a calmer voice, "I am
called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I
am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right."
Those
adept at playing Pakistan's never-ending game of political musical
chairs have begun to take note of Khan. His party, the Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice, or P.T.I., as it is called), has
never won more than a single seat in Pakistan's 342-member National
Assembly. But a recent Pew opinion poll reveals Khan to be the country's
most popular politician by a large margin, and his growing appeal has
drawn together two rivals from the establishment parties - the suavely
patrician figure of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister
from 2008 to 2011, and Javed Hashmi, an older street-fighting politician
from Punjab, Pakistan's politically dominant province - who are now, in
Khan's hastily improvised hierarchy, vice chairman and president of the
P.T.I. respectively.
Khan's campaign strategy is simple: he has
promised to uproot corruption within 90 days, end the country's
involvement in America's war on terror and institute an Islamic welfare
state. His quest for a moral Pakistani state and a righteous politics is
clearly informed by his own private journey. Famous in the 1980s as a
glamorous cricketer, he is at pains to affirm his Islamic identity in
his new autobiography, "Pakistan: A Personal History." A rising
politician's careful self-presentation, the book fails to mention his
friendship with Mick Jagger, his frequenting of London's nightclubs in
the 1980s and other instances of presumably un-Islamic deportment, like
the series of attractive women with whom he was linked by racy British
tabloids. It does devote one chapter to Jemima Goldsmith, the daughter
of a wealthy British businessman, Jimmy Goldsmith, whom he married in
1995 - he was 43, she was 21 - but this serves largely as a backdrop for
his early, self-sacrificing immersion in politics.
His political
enemies in Pakistan, he writes, used Jemima Khan's partly Jewish
ancestry to depict him as a Lothario with dubious Zionist affiliations -
attacks that, Khan claims, made Pakistan a taxing place for Jemima and
eventually led to their divorce. The marriage ended in 2004. Khan's two
sons now live with their mother in London, but he and his wife have
remained friends. In an article in The Independent, Jemima revealed that
Khan stays with her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when in London, and
noted that Khan told her not to worry about how their marriage is
depicted in the book: "You come across as you always wanted to - Joan of
Arc."
References to Allah's grace cropped up early on in Khan's
public utterances, but they multiplied as he struggled to break into
Pakistani politics. He now casts himself as the archetypal confused
sinner who has discovered the restorative certainties of religion and is
outraged over the decadence of his own class. "In today's Lahore and
Karachi," he writes, "rich women go to glitzy parties in Western clothes
chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values." His
avowals of Islam, his identification with the suffering masses and his
attacks on his affluent, English-speaking peers have long been mocked in
the living rooms of Lahore and Karachi as the hypocritical ravings of
"Im the Dim" and "Taliban Khan" - the two favored monikers for him. (His
villa is commonly cited as evidence of his own unalloyed elitism.)
Nevertheless, Khan's autobiography creates a cogent picture out of his -
and Pakistan's - clashing identities. There is the proud young man of
Pashtun blood born into Pakistan's Anglicized feudal and bureaucratic
elite - an elite that disdained their poor, Urdu-speaking compatriots.
There is the student and cricketer in 1970s Britain, when racism was
endemic and even Pakistanis considered themselves inferior to their
former white masters. Then we meet the brilliant cricket captain who
inspired a world-beating team; the D.I.Y. philanthropist who pursued his
dream of building a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan; the jaded
middle-aged sybarite who found a wise Sufi mentor; the political
neophyte who awakened to social and economic injustice; and finally the
experienced politician, who after 15 years of having his faith tested by
electoral failure is now convinced of his destiny as Pakistan's savior.
The day before our evening walk on his estate, I sat in the
living room of Khan's Moorish-style villa, where Pakistan's future was
being plotted by young men in designer shalwar kameezes and sunglasses,
huddled mock-conspiratorially in small groups, and older politicians
sprawled on sofas on the long veranda. The country's broiling summer was
approaching, and violent street protests over power failures had
erupted in many Pakistani cities, adding to the general unease fed by a
floundering economy, gang warfare in Karachi, sectarian killings of
Shiites, the C.I.A.'s drone attacks in the northwestern tribal areas and
the drip-drip of revelations about a defiantly venal ruling class.
Khan
was running nearly three hours late for a rally in the northwestern
town of Mianwali - one of his mass-contact campaigns that had in recent
months galvanized his tiny party. But no one at the villa seemed at all
worried by the delay. After all, Khan is offering nothing less than
revolution of the kind that has swept the Arab world, a "tsunami," in
his own ill-chosen metaphor.
After many attempts, he has
succeeded in provoking a popular response now, perhaps because
Pakistan's institutions are suffering their deepest crisis of
legitimacy. Contempt-of-court charges were filed this year against two
prime ministers. And the debased ancien régime Khan rails against is
gaudily personified by Pakistan's leaders past and present: Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, the military dictator from 1999 to 2008, who now lives in
exile in London and Dubai; the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, who
after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto, conveniently unearthed her last will declaring him her political
heir, then appointed his teenage son, Bilawal, chairman of his party,
the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.); and Nawaz Sharif, who, exalted to
prime-minister in 1990 by Pakistan's all-powerful military establishment
and then banished by it into long exile in 1999, has re-emerged as the
leader of the country's main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim
League - Nawaz (PML-N).
Outside on the veranda, the P.T.I.
chieftains, Qureshi and Hashmi, were confabulating with Hamid Mir, an
influential TV anchor - he interviewed Osama bin Laden both before and
after 9/11 - with a checkered political history. Once known for his
links to Pakistan's military-intelligence complex, Mir has lately
reinvented himself as a critic of the Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate (I.S.I.) - the country's dreaded intelligence agency,
accused by the United States of supporting anti-American militants in
Afghanistan. Army rule ostensibly ended with the enforced departure of
Musharraf in 2008, but the men in uniform, according to Mir, were still
manipulating things behind the scenes.
Snatches of the
conversation between Mir and the P.T.I. chiefs drifted through to the
living room. Mir was saying that Khan's party must dispel the growing
impression that it was an I.S.I. front. Mir failed to mention that it
was he who tweeted recently that the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt.
Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was responsible for the text messages many
politicians received asking them to support Khan.
Suddenly, the
many separate conversations in the living room and veranda ceased,
Qureshi and Hashmi stood to attention and even Mir, who hosted Khan
often on his TV show "Capital Talk," looked a bit star-struck, as the
P.T.I. leader finally bounded in, all coiled energy and purpose.
Khan
had returned late from a rally in Sialkot the previous night, but his
gym-toned frame, encased in a dark gray shalwar kameez, radiated the
supreme assurance of an athlete configured for routine success. In 2009,
I ran into him on a flight from Lahore to London and was impressed by
his unflagging drive. Widely regarded then as a miserable failure in
politics, he seemed eager to claim proximity to powerful men and large
events. During a visit to the United States the previous year, he met
with Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, and told him how the long opposition to the American
war in Afghanistan stoked extremism in Pakistan. He said he expected
Barack Obama to understand that the Pashtun tribes, fighting foreign
occupiers of their land, would never be vanquished. He understood their
mind-set: after all, he himself belonged to a Pashtun tribe.
Khan's
intense nationalism, aroused on cricket fields in the late '70s when
darker-skinned cricketers from the former British Empire finally began
to beat white teams regularly, was whetted in the 1990s by the anti-West
rhetoric of Asian leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and
Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and then by the post-9/11 perception that the
United States had bribed and bullied Pakistan into its misconceived war
on terror and was now controlling the country's internal affairs. "The
Musharraf years were so shameful," he told me. "The Westoxified
Pakistanis have been selling their souls and killing their own people
for a few million dollars. And then the Americans come in with shady
deals to bring Benazir Bhutto back and let crooked people like Zardari
go scot-free. I was so disgusted, and if I hadn't been in politics I
would have left Pakistan."
Moving now through the crowd of his
supporters gathered at his estate, Khan struggled to adopt the
politician's pose of humility. After quick salaam aleikums, he sprang
across the villa's courtyard to his gleaming black S.U.V., Mir, Hashmi
and Qureshi struggling to keep pace with him. Within minutes, the convoy
led by Khan's Land Cruiser was hurtling down the hill on narrow,
potholed roads, past walled mansions and small dark shops, to the
highway to Rawalpindi and the tribal borderlands of Mianwali.
I
sat with Anila Khawaja, Khan's British-born international media
"coordinator." A vivacious woman in her early 40s, Khawaja was one of
the many expatriate Pakistanis either bankrolling or volunteering for
Khan's political campaign. They, along with the tony youth of Lahore and
Karachi, hold up one end of Khan's diverse fan base that also includes
lower-middle-class youth from small Punjabi towns and the tribal regions
of the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. "Imran speaks our
language," Khawaja told me in her British-accented English.
But
it was becoming clear that few other people in his party did. I had
heard about her constant struggles with the P.T.I.'s frustratingly
inefficient, all-male organization, and the heartburn generated among
Khan's stalwart supporters by the rapid promotion of such opportunistic
late-joiners as Hashmi and Qureshi. Khawaja had wanted me to travel with
Khan to the rally in Sialkot but was overruled by her male seniors.
They wanted Khan to themselves at all times, crowding into his car,
jostling to be photographed next to him at his rallies.
I had
heard similar complaints from other members of the party: that the
P.T.I. was a one-man show, with a superstar chairman self-absorbedly
pied-pipering a gaggle of squabbling egos and craven flatterers. For the
moment, however, any anxieties about lack of internal democracy were
balanced by the routinely renewed spectacle of mass support for the
P.T.I. In between tweeting from Khan's account ("Such beautiful
scenery!"), Khawaja pointed excitedly to the crowds of young men on
motorcycles that awaited us at the approaches to small towns along our
route; waving the green-and-red flag of the P.T.I., they raced Khan's
car at dangerous speeds, trying to catch his eye.
Driving to
Khan's rally in Sialkot from Lahore the previous day, I saw car and
motorcycle convoys that extended for miles, freezing traffic whenever
they stopped. The forests of posters and banners in passing bazaars all
featured Khan, photoshopped with Pakistan's revered founding fathers,
the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the politician Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, and dressed in a variety of clothing, from solemn high-collar
jackets to Western bluejeans and leather jackets. Drowning out the faded
signs and symbols of Pakistan's other political parties, they pointed
to Khan's extravagant spending in anticipation of the general elections,
scheduled for next year.
Big money had clearly arranged for the
buntings. But it had not paid for, not entirely at any rate, the crowds
in Sialkot; and the P.T.I. had failed to anticipate their size and
intensity. I squeezed into the stadium where the rally was held by the
narrowest of gates, tearing my shirt in the mini-stampede and curtailing
the arc of a policeman's offhandedly swung baton. Most of the young
rallygoers, dressed in counterfeit brand-name jeans, T-shirts and
sneakers, had traveled to Sialkot on their own, unlike some of their
upper-middle-class peers in Lahore and Karachi, who were bused into
Khan's massive rallies in October and December. They sat patiently
through the long and often boring warm-up speeches, waiting for Khan's
turn at the microphone, and then did not fail to cheer their hero's own
lackluster invocations of the country's founding fathers, Iqbal and
Jinnah.
Talking to the young fans, I discovered an
almost-mystical reverence for Khan. Many of them were cricket
enthusiasts who recalled Khan's exploits with awe, especially his
captaincy of the team that won Pakistan the Cricket World Cup in 1992 -
the country's greatest sporting success. They also knew of his
philanthropic work - the cancer hospital in Lahore and a university near
Mianwali. Pressed on policy specifics, they went blank, claiming that
an honest leader like Khan was all that was needed to turn Pakistan
around, and it could be done in 90 days.
For many in this new
generation of Pakistanis - more than 60 percent of the population is
below age 25 - there is little choice between the untried and evidently
incorruptible Khan and such repeatedly discredited leaders as Zardari
and Sharif. His long and uncompromising opposition to American presence
in the region not only pleases assorted Islamic radicals; it also echoes
a deep Pakistani anger about the C.I.A.'s drone attacks, whose
frequency has increased under the Obama administration. Expatriate and
local businessmen, tormented by the stagnating economy (while
neighboring India has boomed), line up to donate money for his massive
rallies (though Khan himself does not believe, he told me, in
"neoliberal capitalism"). Many rich Pakistanis, like Walid Iqbal, the
Harvard-educated, Porsche-driving grandson of Pakistan's spiritual
founder, whose embrace of the P.T.I. in November had, he told me, made
"national news," see Khan as someone they themselves would like to be:
devoutly Muslim, proudly nationalist, sophisticated, successful.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's private media, which include several raucously
partisan news channels, help obscure Khan's obvious handicaps - the
P.T.I.'s lack of a political base in large provinces like Sindh, a
P.P.P. stronghold - with extensive coverage of his made-for-television
rallies. And it is not inconceivable that the army and the I.S.I. - or
elements within - have spotted a likely winner and potential partner.
Najam Sethi, the editor of a prominent English-language weekly, The
Friday Times, which for years ran a satirical column titled "Im the
Dim," told me that various known sympathizers of the I.S.I. had asked
him to support Khan.
Like all populist politicians, Khan appears
to offer something to everyone. Yet the great differences between his
constituencies - socially liberal, upper-middle-class Pakistanis and the
deeply conservative residents of Pakistan's tribal areas - seem
irreconcilable. The only women I could see during the Sialkot rally were
on the remote stage, wives of local politicians and businessmen, the
sun glinting off their big sunglasses. At the rally in Mianwali, huge
clouds of dust kicked up by tens of thousands of men bleached the reds
and greens of the flags and banners, and the speeches alternated with
earsplitting eruptions of P.T.I.'s theme music, Dil Nek Ho Neeyat Saaf
To Ho Insaf Kahay Imran Khan ("A good heart and pure intentions will
deliver justice, says Imran Khan"). Reports later emerged of many women
at the rally, but I could only see one, on the overcrowded stage. She
was a P.T.I. activist, another recent convert, belonging to one of the
feudal and clan networks that still largely determine who will vote for
whom in Pakistan's elections. There were many such local impresarios of
bloc voting: the uncle of one politician I spoke to defeated Khan in his
very first election in 1997; he had now brought, he claimed, a
25-kilometer-long convoy of supporters from his tribe to the rally.
These traditional middlemen of Pakistani politics were all keen to catch
the eye of the TV anchor Hamid Mir, who sat in the front row, seemingly
untroubled when the speakers pointed to his presence as an endorsement
of the P.T.I.
Khawaja, covering her head with a thin shawl she
said she had packed especially for conservative Mianwali, kept working
Khan's twitter feed: "Such enthusiasm esp from youth! P.T.I.'s wave
rides high!" Khan himself seemed aloof from the cheering crowds and the
party members keen to be near him as he sat, in reading glasses, marking
up his speech. Given the setting, a region adjacent to the tribal areas
where the C.I.A.'s drones are perennially hovering, I expected more
rhetorical onslaughts against the United States and loud avowals of
Islamic piety. (Next month, Khan plans to lead a massive protest march
through Waziristan, accompanied by women from the antiwar American group
Code Pink, as well as armed members of Pashtun tribes.) Khan, who
claims that Obama is "worse than Bush," has been known to pray in public
during his rallies, and one of his party's many vice presidents had in
recent days shared a platform with Hafiz Saeed, founder of the
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization implicated in the attacks on
Mumbai in 2008. While Pakistan's death toll during its participation in
the war on terror - 40,000 - was deplored, the harshest words were
directed at Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif. Their
corruption scandals were brought up and then, unfairly, the brothers'
recourse to hair transplants, which had plainly improved the looks of
many of the politicians hovering around Khan.
The sun, flame-red
and huge behind the dust, had nearly set before Khan took the lectern.
Abruptly, many began leaving. More surprising, the crowd onstage
suddenly thinned. Hamid Mir, followed by a group of autograph seekers
and politicians hoping to be on his show, made a particularly grand
exit. Khan's groupies, having registered their proximity to their idol,
were now trying to avoid the massive traffic pileups resulting from the
wholly unsupervised exit of tens of thousands of rallygoers. "It always
happens," Khawaja told me later. "People want to get close to him, and
then they leave him all alone on the stage."
Khan's disparate
constituencies can make for some strange bedfellows. Senior members of
his party have shared a platform with Difa-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Defense
Council), a coalition of extremist groups that includes anti-Shiite
militants as well as promoters of jihad against India and America. Khan
looked exasperated when I brought up allegations about his party's links
to the I.S.I. and Islamic extremists. "It is these Westoxified
Pakistanis who call me 'Taliban Khan,' " he said, using his favorite
description for Anglicized Pakistanis of his own class. "But how can
they compare me with these uneducated boys of the Taliban or connect me
to mullahs? If you read my book, you will find that the Islam I relate
to is Sufi Islam. Our policy is to talk to all political players. These
so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream;
if you marginalize them, you radicalize them." (After the Americans
began negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he told me with some
satisfaction that they should have done so a long time ago.)
There
was another small explosion of anger when I asked him about his stance
on women's rights. Khan refused in 2006 to support reforms to the
so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to charges of
adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their
violation. Khan claims he voted against the reform bill as a protest
against Musharraf and would repeal the Hudood law altogether if elected.
Many liberal-minded Pakistanis still worried about his positions, I
told Khan.
"Morons!" he exclaimed. "First you have to guarantee
basic social and economic rights before you get to gender rights! What
is the point of these NGO workers showing up in conservative tribal
areas wearing bluejeans?!"
He then turned to his party's
prospects. The conspiracies against him were mounting, he said. In
Lahore, he had received extensive live coverage; the Sialkot and
Mianwali rallies were shown only briefly on the private television
channels. Both Zardari and Sharif were putting pressure on the media.
"They are getting scared," Khan said. "They can see that the tsunami is
coming."
Fortunately, he did not need to rely so much on the
compromised TV channels. "The social media is changing Pakistan," Khan
said. Most Pakistanis had a mobile phone. They were signing up for
Twitter and Facebook in the millions. Direct access to voters meant that
the P.T.I. could ignore the old constituency politics of appeasing the
middlemen. "I always knew," Khan said, "that a mass movement would take
the P.T.I. to power, not wheeling and dealing with power brokers."
Still,
could he dispense with their help entirely? The newspapers were full of
stories of discord between Hashmi and Qureshi and of discontent among
older members of the P.T.I. Khan pondered the question and then said:
"Today in the party meeting we made a breakthrough. We are going to have
a membership drive and then elections through mobile phones. The youth
want new faces. They can elect their own from the ground up. There has
to be democracy in our own party before we bring it to the country. This
is what we decided in the meeting today, and I feel liberated."
Yet
both the media elite that Khan says he can sidestep and the bloggers
and tweeters who shape public opinion in the new media have been vocal
in their criticism. "He says we are working for Nawaz Sharif," Sana
Bucha, one of Pakistan's leading anchors, told me. "But how many rallies
can we cover? The ratings for shows in which Khan appeared have already
fallen; he is overexposed. He is worried of course because he knows
that the media is becoming the most powerful entity in Pakistan now."
Mehmal
Sarfraz, a journalist I met in Lahore, said that Khan's young online
supporters had "fascist" tendencies. Many of them viciously trolled her
whenever she criticized Khan on her blog and on Twitter. (This is a
common experience for Khan's critics. Two weeks after I spoke to Bucha,
Khan appeared on her talk show, apologizing for how some P.T.I.
supporters had harassed her online.) They were particularly angry,
Sarfraz said, laughing, that Khan's critic was a hijab-wearing woman.
She derided Khan's view of extremism in Pakistan as the offshoot of the
American war on terror. "These jihadists supported by the I.S.I. were in
Kashmir well before 9/11. And why does Imran blame Zardari for the
drone attacks when everyone knows that the president has no power and
the military gave the Americans permission to use the drones? It is
because the military and intelligence agencies are backing Imran."
In
the small world of the Pakistani elite, many were equally convinced of
Khan's dubious allegiances. There were stories circulating about how he
recently met the C.I.A. and MI6 in London, then about how the tsunami
was being reversed. The head of the I.S.I., Khan's greatest supporter,
retired in March; the military had decided to support the PML-N in the
next elections; it was why the media were turning away from Khan. It was
hard to navigate this murk of Pakistani politics, the frenetic
conspiracy-theorizing and free-floating malice.
Some things did,
however, seem truer than others. An academic who dislikes Khan said he
was too egotistic to be manipulated by the military establishment. Many
others voiced an apparent consensus that the long years of Musharraf's
misrule and humiliations like the undetected American operation against
Osama bin Laden had damaged the army's reputation and undermined its
authority. It was why politicians like Nawaz Sharif, or journalists like
Hamid Mir, felt emboldened enough to stand up to the men in uniform.
The
army itself was changing under its chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez
Kayani, a "remarkable man," according to a senior Western diplomat.
Battered by the previous decade of the war on terror, it was, the
diplomat claimed, moving out of politics and shifting to a focus on
economic growth and a new policy of détente, if not peace, with its old
enemy, India. The novelist Mohammed Hanif had another interpretation of
the army's chastened mood. As he told me, with a wry smile, "They have
no one left to lie to, no one left to betray."
The next time I
saw Khan, it was April and he had just returned from a trip to Turkey,
where he met Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Khan's tweets, with
their characteristic exclamation marks, kept me informed about his
progress. "Turkey today has embraced its past & moved forward as a
confident nation proud of its history & present achievements. We can
learn so much!" He seemed more pumped up than usual, his pre-big-game
go-get-'em zeal spilling over into repetitive praise for the Turkish
leadership.
"Abdullah Gul and Erdogan - they are such impressive
people. I last went to Turkey on my honeymoon. In 15 years, they have
totally transformed the country!"
"The most interesting thing,"
he added later "is how they have controlled the army which ruled Turkey
for such a long time. You can of course do that if you have moral
authority invested in you by the people."
We were driving to yet
another rally, this one in Abbottabad (Khawaja had briefly triumphed
over her male colleagues and managed to insert me in Khan's Land
Cruiser). Khan sat next to the driver; I was placed between the two
rivals, Hashmi and Qureshi. As we drove past the villa's wrought-iron
gates, again late for the rally by nearly three hours, Khan said,
"Inshallah, we will make history today." "Inshallah, Inshallah," Hashmi
and Querishi repeated. It wasn't clear initially what they were
referring to, but eventually it transpired that the hilly town of
Abbottabad, which had become famous around the world as Osama bin
Laden's last residence, the place where he settled into discreet
domesticity with his multiple wives and was killed by American forces,
could now re-enter history for hosting a massive P.T.I. rally.
The
event also marked a return to the generous media coverage the P.T.I.
had enjoyed. Many channels promised to cover the rally live, even though
President Zardari was visiting India the same day after a long gap. It
explained the buoyant mood in the car, and Khan's own cheerfulness. The
mood was absorbed by the driver, who declined to pay at a tollbooth on
the winding road to Abbottabad, gesturing to his V.I.P. passenger. As we
moved off, Khan reprimanded the driver, good-humoredly: "Tuu abhii se
baadshah ho gayaa hai!" - "You are already behaving like an emperor!"
Khan
chortled over the fact that the previous week, President Zardari's son,
Bilawal Bhutto, the 23-year-old chairman of the P.P.P., had apparently
made a speech in English to his party members. "The poor guy doesn't
know any Urdu." Khan took a few swipes at various "Westoxified"
Pakistanis sought after by deluded Westerners: the editor Najam Sethi
("State Department's man"); the journalist Ahmed Rashid ("totally
bogus"). He then gossiped with Qureshi and Hashmi about the wealth of
various politicians, like the former interior minister, Rehman Malik, a
"frontman for Zardari," who, they said, had a personal fortune of $300
million.
Khan tittered when I told him that many people thought
of him as an I.S.I. frontman. "The I.S.I.," he said, "was unable to
muster up an audience for even Pervez Musharraf's rally when he was in
power. They cannot manufacture people's enthusiasm for change." As he
spoke, three boys at a slow turn in the road ran toward his car, and
Khan, gesturing to them, drawled, "You can see the tsunami coming. It
cannot be stopped.
"The man who says we are the I.S.I.'s
creation," he added, "is Nawaz Sharif - and he himself was a creation of
the I.S.I.!" I felt Hashmi, once Sharif's close colleague, stiffen by
my side.
While Khawaja was busy tweeting on his behalf from
another car ("Route to Abbottabad a reminder of the intense beauty of
our wonderful country! Green hues of plants, golden wheat, fruit trees -
God's gifts"), Khan continued his jaunty disparagements. "The Americans
are making such big mistakes. They should have tried Osama bin Laden
like Saddam Hussein was; even the Nazis, who killed millions, received a
trial." He kept returning to Turkey as an instructive lesson for
Pakistan. "At least their army actually fought and defeated European
armies, and created a nation." Hashmi made a joke, which I couldn't
really follow, about the Pakistani Army as the "defender of faith." Both
Khan and Qureshi laughed heartily.
As we drew closer to
Abbottabad, some text messages on Khan's Blackberry punctured the
cheerful mood. Khan was told that he couldn't speak before 5 p.m. if he
wanted to avoid clashing with Zardari's photo-op in India. The rally
itself, held in a sports stadium, was the usual bedlam, except that this
time there was a large gallery filled with women.
I had already
read Khan's speech, peering over his shoulder in the car; it was not
much different from what he said in previous rallies. Like many in the
audience, I left before 5 p.m., late in Abbottabad's valley, where
darkness sets in early. On the way back to Islamabad, I stopped at a
grocery store to buy some water. The owner, watching wrestling on his
small television set, was a bit reluctant when I asked him to switch
over to Khan's rally. "Has Imran come?" he asked. "Is he speaking now?
People have been waiting since noon."
I told him the crowd was
starting to disperse. "Of course they will," he retorted. "They have to
travel long distances in the hills." He snorted when I said that the
lateness of Khan's speech was due to the media's schedule. After some
channel-hopping, I caught a brief clip of Khan at the rally repeating
his gibe about Bilawal Bhutto's lack of Urdu. The depleted crowd, it
seemed clear, was not going to make history for Imran Khan, or supersede
Abbottabad's reputation as the town where a semiretired terrorist found
marital bliss. But he seemed more relaxed than he was in Sialkot and
Mianwali. The TV channels had clearly not betrayed him. And for once his
groupies, spellbound by the cameramen, had not abandoned Khan onstage.
© 2012, The New York Times News Service
