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06-08-2024
By SJA Jafri
ISLAMABAD/ LAHORE: Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has now been behind bars for a year although there are times you would barely know it.
Khan is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics; his name still in the papers and the courts. His social media supporters have been unrelenting.
With no public appearances, the few people allowed in to see the former cricket star regularly his lawyers and family have become his conduit for messages to the outside world. They are keen to push the message that his 365 days behind bars have left him unbowed.
“There is still a swagger about him,” Aleema Khanum, Imran Khan’s sister, says. “He’s got no needs, no wants only a cause.”
According to those who visit him, Khan spends his days on his exercise bike, reading and reflecting. He has an hour a day to walk around the courtyard. There have been occasional disagreements about how quickly the family can provide him with new books.
“He has said ‘I’m not wasting a minute of my time in jail, it’s an opportunity for me to get more knowledge’,” Khanum tells the media but the fact is Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi are still trapped in prison, with no sign they will be released any time soon.
According to some, this is not a surprise.
“There was no expectation that Khan was going to do anything that would make it easy for him to get out of jail,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington.
And the military, Pakistan’s powerful behind-the-scenes player, “don’t ease up when they decide there’s a political figure that they want to lock up”, says Kugelman. “That has especially been the case with Khan.”
Indeed, the military has been key to many of the ups and downs of Khan’s life in the last decade. Many analysts believe it was his initial close relationship with the military establishment which helped him win power but by 9 May last year, that was in tatters. Khan – who had been ousted from power in a vote of no confidence in 2022 had been arrested, and his supporters came out to protest.
Some of those protests turned violent, and there were attacks on military buildings including the official residence of the most senior army official in Lahore which was looted and set alight.
In the aftermath, sources said Pakistan’s media companies had been told to stop showing his picture, saying his name or playing his voice.
Khan was released but ultimately only for a few months.
He was jailed again on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts and that was just the start.
In the run-up to the election, the cases against him mounted; by the start of February just days before the vote, the 71-year-old had acquired three long prison sentences, the last for 14 years.
By the election, many of the candidates standing for Khan’s PTI party were also in prison or in hiding, the party stripped of its well-recognized symbol of a cricket bat, a vital identifier in a country with a 58% literacy rate.
Despite this, “we were determined and wanted to make a statement”, Salman Akram Raja, Khan’s lawyer and a candidate in the election, says.
“It was very constrained, many couldn’t campaign at all. The loss of the cricket bat symbol was the body blow.” All candidates stood as independents but hopes, even within the party, weren’t high.
