Imran Khan, cricket star turned Pakistani PM, arrested again

ISLAMABAD, Aug 5 (Reuters) – Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has arrested for the second time in four months on Saturday, he faces an increasingly difficult challenge as he bids to regain office in elections to be held in November.

The arrest is yet another setback for the former cricket star who has won popular support since being ousted last year in a bitter clash with the powerful. militarybut he has faced divisions within his party.

Khan, 70, is the South Asian nation’s most popular leader, according to opinion polls. A brief arrest in May on separate corruption charges sparked deadly riots across the country at a time of economic crisis.

He has denied any wrongdoing, telling Reuters in June that the army, which has ruled Pakistan for most of its history since independence in 1947, and its intelligence agency were trying to destroy his political party.

The cricket star-turned-politician then predicted he would be jailed again, though he said he would be tried by a military court. The decision on Saturday came from the Islamabad district court.

The military, which controls some of the nation’s biggest economic institutions with nuclear weapons, has said it is neutral on politics.

Khan became the top opposition politician after being ousted as prime minister in April 2022 amid public frustration over high inflation, rising deficits and the endemic corruption he had vowed to root out.

The Supreme Court overturned his decision to dissolve parliament, and defections from his ruling coalition meant he lost a subsequent vote of no confidence in parliament.

With that, Khan became the latest in an unbroken line of elected Pakistani prime ministers who did not serve their full terms.

He was injured when his motorcade was attacked by a gunman in November as he was leading supporters in Islamabad, seeking an early general election.

LONG RISE, SUDDEN FALL

Once criticized for being under the control of the generals, Khan had a falling out with the then army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, which led to his expulsion.

He has said that the army, now under the command of General Asim Munir, is still attacking him and his party in an attempt to keep him out of the elections and prevent him from returning to power. The army denies it.

He says that more than 150 court cases have been filed against him.

The violence after his arrest in May may have led to tensions with the army, as his supporters looted military establishments in several cities.

Some leaders of Khan’s political party resigned after the violence. Thousands of party workers also remain under arrest, the party says.

In 2018, the cricket legend who led Pakistan to its only World Cup victory in 1992, united the country behind his vision of a prosperous, corruption-free nation respected abroad. But the fame and charisma of the incendiary nationalist were not enough.

Khan came to power more than two decades after launching Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), Pakistan’s Justice Movement party. Despite his fame and hero status in cricket-mad Pakistan, the PTI languished in Pakistan’s political desert, without winning a seat other than Khan’s for 17 years.

In 2011, Khan began drawing large crowds of young Pakistanis disillusioned with endemic corruption, chronic electricity shortages, and crises in education and unemployment.

He gained even greater support in the years that followed, with educated Pakistani expatriates leaving their jobs to work for his party and pop musicians and actors joining his campaign.

His goal, Khan told supporters in 2018, was to turn Pakistan from a country with a “small group of rich and a sea of ​​poor” into an “example of a humane system, a just system, for the world, of what that he is an Islamic”. the welfare state is”.

He won, a sports hero at the pinnacle of politics. Observers warned, however, that his greatest enemy was his own rhetoric, which had raised the hopes of supporters through the roof.

PLAYBOY TO REFORMER

Born in 1952, the son of a civil engineer, Khan grew up with four sisters in a wealthy urban Pashtun family in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.

After a privileged education, he went on to Oxford University, graduating with a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

As his cricket career flourished, he developed a reputation as a playboy in London in the late 1970s.

In 1995, he married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of business magnate James Goldsmith. The couple, who had two children, divorced in 2004. A second marriage, to television journalist Reham Nayyar Khan, also ended in divorce.

His third marriage, to Bushra Bibi, a spiritual leader whom Khan met during visits to a 13th-century shrine in Pakistan, reflected his growing interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic practice that emphasizes spiritual closeness to God.

Once in power, Khan embarked on his plan to build a welfare state based on what he said was an ideal system dating back to the Islamic world some 14 centuries earlier.

But his anti-corruption campaign was heavily criticized as a tool to sideline political opponents, many of whom have been jailed on corruption charges.

Pakistan’s generals also remained powerful, and military officers, retired and serving, were placed in charge of more than a dozen civilian institutions.

Written by the Islamabad office; Edited by William Mallard

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