Near London’s Hyde Park earlier this month, a video was taken of a man holding a blue Adidas trainer, which he was using to hit a nearby poster. He took his time to ensure he whacked the images of five judges on Pakistan’s Supreme Court who had recently ruled that a vote of no confidence in Imran Khan, the then prime minister, could go ahead.
Khan, a cricket legend who entered politics in the mid-1990s, was subsequently ousted after 174 members of Pakistan’s parliament voted for his removal. The no-confidence motion required 172 votes to be carried and the country’s Supreme Court found he acted unconstitutionally when he tried to stop the vote from going ahead.
“I will break the glasses on his face,” the man in the video can be heard saying in Urdu, referring to one of the judges. Another man, filmed by journalist Murtaza Ali Shah, spits on the poster as he walks past.
The animosity expressed by Khan’s supporters in London followed weeks of accusations from opposition politicians that the former prime minister has stoked public unrest to maintain control.
Khan has claimed that his removal from power was part of a US-led conspiracy which targeted him because he refused to cancel a visit to Moscow in February. The US has denied these allegations, but Khan has shown no sign of backing down. After the Supreme Court verdict, he tweeted that he would continue to fight for Pakistan “till the last ball”, a reference to the sport that made him famous.
Khan, who is the country’s first prime minister to be removed from power by a no-confidence vote, has received an intense outpouring of support since being dismissed just over two weeks ago. At rallies attended by thousands across the country, fans have shouted slogans pledging his return to power and denouncing the US.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice – PTI ), the political party Khan founded in 1996, appears intent on capitalising on the momentum and has held large protests in various cities around the country.
Similar rallies were held by PTI supporters in Dubai and London, including outside the home of Jemima Goldsmith, Khan’s ex-wife, in Richmond. The Metropolitan Police said that officers had been present during the protest outside Goldsmith’s home and no arrests were made.
Khan’s popularity is even more evident on social media, where he commands large followings and speaks directly to supporters. A Twitter Spaces event, at which Khan spoke last week, is believed to have set a new record for listenership on the platform with more than 160,000 people tuning in to hear him live.
Shehbaz Sharif, leader of Pakistan’s opposition coalition, was chosen to replace Khan as prime minister until the next general election, which may be called later this year and in which the former prime minister may run again.
Given that his removal seems to have emboldened his base, political analysts believe Khan’s return to government is entirely possible. Even if he is never re-elected, the political scene in Pakistan, a nation which came into being only 75 years ago, may never be the same.
The cult of Khan
Khan’s rise to power in 2018, when he was elected prime minister, was marked by pledges to fight corruption and improve Pakistan’s economy. His rhetoric was successful at pulling in large crowds for events, but inflation devastated the country and pushed millions towards poverty.
He was put under increasing pressure earlier this year when food inflation rose to 15 per cent. He has also been struggling to maintain the support of the military, a powerful force in Pakistan, as evidenced by numerous periods of martial law in the country’s history.
Opinion polls indicated Khan’s party was losing out on support in recent months, probably due to the rising cost of living and people feeling that election promises were not being upheld. The opposition said the vote of no-confidence was tabled because of Khan’s failure to deliver on promises, citing inflation and other economic pressures.
Raza Ahmad Rumi, a Pakistani policy analyst and faculty member at Cornell University, in New York, said people in Pakistan had been feeling the pain from the country’s economic woes, which he said were the result of “shambolic governance”.
Despite this, he said, Khan has been able to pivot the conversation from inflation to a US-led conspiracy extremely quickly. He said anti-American rhetoric was very powerful in Pakistan and Khan tapped into this “false bravado” to boost his support.
“His smart use of social media to build a particular narrative has certainly revived his popularity, at least among his support base,” Rumi told the Business Post. “They feel he is a victim, he's been wronged, there was a foreign conspiracy, the military and the judges pulled him out. And so that has been his clever sort of use of the narrative.”
Rumi warned that while Khan can draw a crowd of thousands, this should be viewed in comparison to the population of some of the cities in which he held rallies, which can be in the millions. He said the PTI were effective at creating the impression that Khan has widespread support, but this may not be borne out in reality.
While PTI gained the most seats in the 2018 election, it received only 32 per cent of the popular vote. Political scientists said the party is most popular with the middle class and those living in urban areas, but a large portion of Pakistan’s population does not fall into either of these categories.
“When it comes to the next election, it is not necessarily the case that all of this translates into the popular vote, or seats in the parliament,” Rumi said. “He is popular in certain sections and shall remain so, there’s no question about that, but to say that’s the majority would not be an accurate statement.”
While the PTI’s loss of support from coalition allies resulted in the successful vote of no confidence, Khan also appeared to lose the military. Since Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, martial law has been introduced numerous times and the country has been often ruled by an army or military leader.
Khan had enjoyed the support of the military and was accused by the opposition of being “selected” by them to win in 2018.
A rift began to appear in 2020, however, when there was controversy over the extension of an army chief’s tenure. Tensions further began to rise last year after Khan was reportedly unhappy with a decision to change the director general of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), an important agency which oversees internal and external army intelligence.
Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani political scientist and research associate at SOAS University of London, said these confrontations exposed cracks in Khan’s leadership and led him down a familiar path.
“He has made the same mistakes as the former political leaders of trying to challenge military authority but without understanding how the military, as an institution, works,” Siddiqa said.
“It’s a funny thing in south Asian politics, they are either dynastic or cultish, and cultish politics always turns out to be very excessive. Imran Khan is a cult. There is no party structure behind him. I mean, there is a party, but will that party survive if he’s not there? Not for a minute. Not for a single minute.”
A cricketing playboy
Khan was born in October 1952 to an affluent family in Lahore, the second-largest city in Pakistan. He was educated in Pakistan and Britain before becoming involved with cricket in the 1970s.
While he was captain of the team, Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in 1992. His sporting fame was also heightened by a heart-throb status he was given by fans at home and abroad. He was regularly seen in London nightclubs and featured in British tabloids, especially concerning his ill-fated marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, a socialite and journalist.
He has two adult sons from his marriage with Goldsmith. His current spouse is Bushra Bibi, a spiritual healer whom he was reportedly visiting for guidance years before marrying her in 2018.
A number of analysts have drawn comparisons between Khan and Donald Trump, the former US president who rode a wave of fame from reality television to the White House. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist and activist, made the connection between the two men in 2015 and has written in recent years about how this prediction came to pass. He said the political toolkits of both Khan and Trump included “abundant use of abusive language for firing up supportive mobs”.
“So is making promises which, even if unfulfillable, help generate fantasies in their followers,” he wrote last month in The Print, an Indian online newspaper.
As he turned to politics in the late 1990s, Khan shed the playboy persona and became an increasingly and openly devout Muslim.
Rumi said not only did Khan start discovering his religious roots, he began writing articles that decried colonialism. He said that, while there was definitely a genuine aspect to Khan’s religious zeal, many people believe he used it for political purposes.
“The second-most popular thing that works for politicians in Pakistan, after anti-Americanism, is recourse to religion and religious vocabulary,” Rumi said, noting that Khan often professed a desire to turn Pakistan into a “Madina state”, a utopia that harks back to one created by the prophet Mohammed.
“You know, once again, it's a bit like Make America Great Again,” Rumi said, referencing the slogan used by Trump during his campaign. “So he's been making these really religiously motivated decisions mainly to prove himself as some kind of pious man.”
Pakistan has increasingly clamped down on dissenting voices during Khan’s term in office, according to Human Rights Watch. The international NGO said Pakistani authorities routinely use draconian counterterrorism and sedition laws to intimidate peaceful critics.
“Law enforcement agencies carry out arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings with impunity,” it notes on its website.
In June 2018, Gul Bukhari, a Pakistani journalist who openly criticised the military, was briefly kidnapped by masked men in Lahore. She was freed several hours later. The abduction caused outrage among colleagues.
Bukhari told WION News earlier this month that it was evident, based on Khan’s attempts to stop the no-confidence vote from going ahead, that the situation in Pakistan was “very dire”.
“For the sake of ego, for the sake of not facing a no-confidence vote, Imran Khan has plunged the entire country into a crisis,” she said, “and has sent relations with the United States to rock bottom.”
The sincerity of Khan’s statements denouncing the US and encouraging his followers to do the same was called into question last week when Ilhan Omar, a member of the US House of Representatives, was pictured in a photograph with Khan.
Omar was visiting Pakistani leaders in the first visit by a member of Congress since the new coalition government was formed. A PTI member posted a photograph to Twitter showing Omar and Khan standing together, with the caption stating that they discussed Islamophobia.
Siddiqa said that Khan likely viewed meeting a US representative as in line with his mission to fight Islamaphobia. She said she did not think he himself believed in his own conspiracy about the US. “What he believes is that he can use the argument to his benefit,” she said.
The road ahead for Khan may be a rocky one, given that his party is currently subject to a foreign funding case before the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which is due to be decided in the coming weeks.
The allegations stem from claims made in 2014 by a founding PTI member, who claimed that foreign money was illegally channelled and not properly disclosed. Khan could face a ruling disqualifying him from politics for five years if the ECP decides against him.
As a result of soaring inflation and Pakistan’s other economic problems, experts believe the months ahead for those living there may get worse before they get better. This may be used to Khan’s advantage as he stokes discontent among his supporters.
While the unrest has the potential to erupt into more aggressive protests, Siddiqa said people in Pakistan have not shown a strong inclination towards a revolution. She said what worried her was that a large portion of people who have emotionally invested in Khan will be left with a lot of resentment when he eventually leaves the political arena.
“It's important to understand that you have this population which was looking for direction, for a new direction, and we cannot ignore it,” she said. “So the question is, when he falls, what happens to that population?”
This report was originally published in Business Post. It has been reproduced with permission with an amended caption.
Khan, a cricket legend who entered politics in the mid-1990s, was subsequently ousted after 174 members of Pakistan’s parliament voted for his removal. The no-confidence motion required 172 votes to be carried and the country’s Supreme Court found he acted unconstitutionally when he tried to stop the vote from going ahead.
“I will break the glasses on his face,” the man in the video can be heard saying in Urdu, referring to one of the judges. Another man, filmed by journalist Murtaza Ali Shah, spits on the poster as he walks past.
The animosity expressed by Khan’s supporters in London followed weeks of accusations from opposition politicians that the former prime minister has stoked public unrest to maintain control.
Khan has claimed that his removal from power was part of a US-led conspiracy which targeted him because he refused to cancel a visit to Moscow in February. The US has denied these allegations, but Khan has shown no sign of backing down. After the Supreme Court verdict, he tweeted that he would continue to fight for Pakistan “till the last ball”, a reference to the sport that made him famous.
Khan, who is the country’s first prime minister to be removed from power by a no-confidence vote, has received an intense outpouring of support since being dismissed just over two weeks ago. At rallies attended by thousands across the country, fans have shouted slogans pledging his return to power and denouncing the US.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice – PTI ), the political party Khan founded in 1996, appears intent on capitalising on the momentum and has held large protests in various cities around the country.
Similar rallies were held by PTI supporters in Dubai and London, including outside the home of Jemima Goldsmith, Khan’s ex-wife, in Richmond. The Metropolitan Police said that officers had been present during the protest outside Goldsmith’s home and no arrests were made.
Khan’s popularity is even more evident on social media, where he commands large followings and speaks directly to supporters. A Twitter Spaces event, at which Khan spoke last week, is believed to have set a new record for listenership on the platform with more than 160,000 people tuning in to hear him live.
Shehbaz Sharif, leader of Pakistan’s opposition coalition, was chosen to replace Khan as prime minister until the next general election, which may be called later this year and in which the former prime minister may run again.
Given that his removal seems to have emboldened his base, political analysts believe Khan’s return to government is entirely possible. Even if he is never re-elected, the political scene in Pakistan, a nation which came into being only 75 years ago, may never be the same.
The cult of Khan
Khan’s rise to power in 2018, when he was elected prime minister, was marked by pledges to fight corruption and improve Pakistan’s economy. His rhetoric was successful at pulling in large crowds for events, but inflation devastated the country and pushed millions towards poverty.
He was put under increasing pressure earlier this year when food inflation rose to 15 per cent. He has also been struggling to maintain the support of the military, a powerful force in Pakistan, as evidenced by numerous periods of martial law in the country’s history.
Opinion polls indicated Khan’s party was losing out on support in recent months, probably due to the rising cost of living and people feeling that election promises were not being upheld. The opposition said the vote of no-confidence was tabled because of Khan’s failure to deliver on promises, citing inflation and other economic pressures.
Raza Ahmad Rumi, a Pakistani policy analyst and faculty member at Cornell University, in New York, said people in Pakistan had been feeling the pain from the country’s economic woes, which he said were the result of “shambolic governance”.
Khan’s rise to power in 2018, when he was elected prime minister, was marked by pledges to fight corruption and improve Pakistan’s economy. His rhetoric was successful at pulling in large crowds for events, but inflation devastated the country and pushed millions towards poverty.
Despite this, he said, Khan has been able to pivot the conversation from inflation to a US-led conspiracy extremely quickly. He said anti-American rhetoric was very powerful in Pakistan and Khan tapped into this “false bravado” to boost his support.
“His smart use of social media to build a particular narrative has certainly revived his popularity, at least among his support base,” Rumi told the Business Post. “They feel he is a victim, he's been wronged, there was a foreign conspiracy, the military and the judges pulled him out. And so that has been his clever sort of use of the narrative.”
Rumi warned that while Khan can draw a crowd of thousands, this should be viewed in comparison to the population of some of the cities in which he held rallies, which can be in the millions. He said the PTI were effective at creating the impression that Khan has widespread support, but this may not be borne out in reality.
While PTI gained the most seats in the 2018 election, it received only 32 per cent of the popular vote. Political scientists said the party is most popular with the middle class and those living in urban areas, but a large portion of Pakistan’s population does not fall into either of these categories.
“When it comes to the next election, it is not necessarily the case that all of this translates into the popular vote, or seats in the parliament,” Rumi said. “He is popular in certain sections and shall remain so, there’s no question about that, but to say that’s the majority would not be an accurate statement.”
While the PTI’s loss of support from coalition allies resulted in the successful vote of no confidence, Khan also appeared to lose the military. Since Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, martial law has been introduced numerous times and the country has been often ruled by an army or military leader.
Khan had enjoyed the support of the military and was accused by the opposition of being “selected” by them to win in 2018.
A rift began to appear in 2020, however, when there was controversy over the extension of an army chief’s tenure. Tensions further began to rise last year after Khan was reportedly unhappy with a decision to change the director general of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), an important agency which oversees internal and external army intelligence.
Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani political scientist and research associate at SOAS University of London, said these confrontations exposed cracks in Khan’s leadership and led him down a familiar path.
“He has made the same mistakes as the former political leaders of trying to challenge military authority but without understanding how the military, as an institution, works,” Siddiqa said.
“It’s a funny thing in south Asian politics, they are either dynastic or cultish, and cultish politics always turns out to be very excessive. Imran Khan is a cult. There is no party structure behind him. I mean, there is a party, but will that party survive if he’s not there? Not for a minute. Not for a single minute.”
A cricketing playboy
Khan was born in October 1952 to an affluent family in Lahore, the second-largest city in Pakistan. He was educated in Pakistan and Britain before becoming involved with cricket in the 1970s.
While he was captain of the team, Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in 1992. His sporting fame was also heightened by a heart-throb status he was given by fans at home and abroad. He was regularly seen in London nightclubs and featured in British tabloids, especially concerning his ill-fated marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, a socialite and journalist.
He has two adult sons from his marriage with Goldsmith. His current spouse is Bushra Bibi, a spiritual healer whom he was reportedly visiting for guidance years before marrying her in 2018.
A number of analysts have drawn comparisons between Khan and Donald Trump, the former US president who rode a wave of fame from reality television to the White House. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist and activist, made the connection between the two men in 2015 and has written in recent years about how this prediction came to pass. He said the political toolkits of both Khan and Trump included “abundant use of abusive language for firing up supportive mobs”.
“So is making promises which, even if unfulfillable, help generate fantasies in their followers,” he wrote last month in The Print, an Indian online newspaper.
As he turned to politics in the late 1990s, Khan shed the playboy persona and became an increasingly and openly devout Muslim.
Rumi said not only did Khan start discovering his religious roots, he began writing articles that decried colonialism. He said that, while there was definitely a genuine aspect to Khan’s religious zeal, many people believe he used it for political purposes.
“The second-most popular thing that works for politicians in Pakistan, after anti-Americanism, is recourse to religion and religious vocabulary,” Rumi said, noting that Khan often professed a desire to turn Pakistan into a “Madina state”, a utopia that harks back to one created by the prophet Mohammed.
“You know, once again, it's a bit like Make America Great Again,” Rumi said, referencing the slogan used by Trump during his campaign. “So he's been making these really religiously motivated decisions mainly to prove himself as some kind of pious man.”
Pakistan has increasingly clamped down on dissenting voices during Khan’s term in office, according to Human Rights Watch. The international NGO said Pakistani authorities routinely use draconian counterterrorism and sedition laws to intimidate peaceful critics.
“Law enforcement agencies carry out arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings with impunity,” it notes on its website.
In June 2018, Gul Bukhari, a Pakistani journalist who openly criticised the military, was briefly kidnapped by masked men in Lahore. She was freed several hours later. The abduction caused outrage among colleagues.
Bukhari told WION News earlier this month that it was evident, based on Khan’s attempts to stop the no-confidence vote from going ahead, that the situation in Pakistan was “very dire”.
“For the sake of ego, for the sake of not facing a no-confidence vote, Imran Khan has plunged the entire country into a crisis,” she said, “and has sent relations with the United States to rock bottom.”
The sincerity of Khan’s statements denouncing the US and encouraging his followers to do the same was called into question last week when Ilhan Omar, a member of the US House of Representatives, was pictured in a photograph with Khan.
Omar was visiting Pakistani leaders in the first visit by a member of Congress since the new coalition government was formed. A PTI member posted a photograph to Twitter showing Omar and Khan standing together, with the caption stating that they discussed Islamophobia.
Siddiqa said that Khan likely viewed meeting a US representative as in line with his mission to fight Islamaphobia. She said she did not think he himself believed in his own conspiracy about the US. “What he believes is that he can use the argument to his benefit,” she said.
The road ahead for Khan may be a rocky one, given that his party is currently subject to a foreign funding case before the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which is due to be decided in the coming weeks.
The allegations stem from claims made in 2014 by a founding PTI member, who claimed that foreign money was illegally channelled and not properly disclosed. Khan could face a ruling disqualifying him from politics for five years if the ECP decides against him.
As a result of soaring inflation and Pakistan’s other economic problems, experts believe the months ahead for those living there may get worse before they get better. This may be used to Khan’s advantage as he stokes discontent among his supporters.
While the unrest has the potential to erupt into more aggressive protests, Siddiqa said people in Pakistan have not shown a strong inclination towards a revolution. She said what worried her was that a large portion of people who have emotionally invested in Khan will be left with a lot of resentment when he eventually leaves the political arena.
“It's important to understand that you have this population which was looking for direction, for a new direction, and we cannot ignore it,” she said. “So the question is, when he falls, what happens to that population?”
This report was originally published in Business Post. It has been reproduced with permission with an amended caption.