Making sense of Imran: On, off field

IMRAN KHAN, the former Pakistan cricket team captain and, less impressively, the former Pakistan Prime Minister, has dodged the bullet. Shot at by a sole gunman — whose confession on video shows him to be disarmingly simple-minded — during his protest march towards Islamabad, Imran was injured in his lower leg but was able to wave at his supporters before being taken to hospital.

From hospital, he vowed to resume his ‘long march’, with which he hopes to force the ‘establishment’ to hold early elections. Ousted from power in April after a no-confidence vote, he has used the reservoir of anti-American and anti-army sentiment in Pakistan to reach unprecedented heights of popularity — in last month’s byelections, he contested in seven out of eight constituencies that went to poll. He won six of the seven constituencies, across Sindh, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

Imran’s popularity seems to be at an all-time high in Pakistan, even higher than it was three-four decades ago, when he was a matchless cricketer — the sight of him sprinting in to bowl, hair flying and menace in his eye, was something to behold.

In the early 1980s, Imran was the gold standard for cricketing excellence. The young Imran was a fantastic athlete who inspired awe among his peers. At his prime, he was a magnificent animal — tall, strong, tireless, fearless and sharp on the field. ‘We would cover up our flabby bodies while Imran would walk round half-naked with just a small towel,’ Sunil Gavaskar told a British writer years ago.

Sanjay Manjrekar has written about the awe in which he held the Pakistan captain, about the cricketing camaraderie and lack of nationalistic sentiment Imran demonstrated off the field. Bishan Singh Bedi can’t stop talking about Imran’s work ethic and acumen. As for the Pakistani players, they literally worship him.

Men envied him. Women loved him — and Imran was acutely aware of their availability and dispensability for him; this is what we would now term misogyny, for their availability to him made him respect them less. The Great Khan was a playboy, dating socialites and actresses, before he found God in 1987, after a mystifying meeting with a ‘spiritual man’ following a hunting trip near Lahore.

Curiously, the ‘spiritual’ Imran, after a third marriage with a ‘peerni’, has became a less likeable person — he berates the beleaguered liberals of his country by calling them ‘khooni’ (murderous), he blames women for being molested or raped (men are not robots, he says), he ridicules Bilawal Bhutto by calling him ‘Bilawal Sahiba’ (Bilawal ma’am). Sport prizes masculinity, and it often turns toxic — Imran did displace toxicity in the 1980s, as when he held a 12-year-old pitch invader with a choke-hold on throat in 1982, or kicked a fan or treated a woman cricketer with contempt after she sought his support for women’s cricket.

Imran hasn’t mellowed with age — just the opposite, in fact.

But he remains an awe-inspiring figure. He has challenged the feared ‘establishment’ — the army — like no other leader in the history of Pakistan. His insinuations against the ‘establishment’ over the mysterious murder of a Pakistani journalist, Arshad Sharif, in Kenya forced the reclusive chief of the feared intelligence agency ISI to appear in a press conference to deny the charge.

By attacking the Generals, Imran may have burnt his bridges with the army — did that lead to the attack on him? Or was his attacker a lone-wolf radical, angered by the loudspeakers of Imran’s convoy interfering with the call to prayer?

It’s likely that Imran will not back down. He claims to be doing God’s work — the ‘jehad’ of cleansing Pakistani politics of corruption. He has been implicated for selling toshakhana gifts for profit but seems to believe himself to the man chosen for the clean-up job. The messiah of the nation of Pakistan, just as he was the messiah of the Pakistan cricket team.

World Cup

Like any good conservative, Imran was not a big fan of T20 cricket. Before the first IPL, this writer had called him up for his views about the shortest format of the sport. “If a team wins a T20 competition, I won’t necessarily consider it as a quality team, because any team can win such a short competition. Test cricket remains the true test of a cricketer,” Imran had said.

In the ongoing T20 World Cup, the fallibility of top teams against lower-ranked teams has been amply demonstrated. The format is thrilling, and often matches are decided on the last ball: Espncricinfo.com notes that out of round 440 T20I matches whose details are available, a staggering 33 per cent were decided on the last ball. As Rahul Dravid says, T20 cricket results boil down to just a couple of hits.

That was the view of Imran, too — he always did make sense when discussing cricket, if not politics or gender or liberalism.