Pakistan: A Personal History

257 Pages·2011·8.38 MB·English

by  Imran Khan

Aboutth eB ook
Born only five years after Pakistan was created in 1947, Imran Khan has lived his
country's history. Undermined by a ruling elite hungry for money and power, Pakistan
now stands alone as the only Islamic country with a nuclear bomb, yet it is unable to
protect its people from the carnage of regular bombings from terrorists and its own ally,
America. Now with the revelation that Pakistan has been the hiding place of Osama bin
Laden for several years, that relationship can only grow more strained. How did it reach
this flashpoint of instability and injustice with such potentially catastrophic results for
Pakistan?
Recounting his country's history through the prism of his own memories, Imran Khan
starts from its foundation, ripped out of the dying British Raj. He guides us through and
comments on subsequent historical developments which shook the Muslim world -the
wars with India in 1965 and 1971, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America's retribution ten years later with the
assassination of bin Laden - to the current controversial and intractable war in
Afghanistan. We see these events viewed not only through the eyes of Westerners, but
through those of ordinary Pakistanis.
Drawing on the experiences of his own family and his wide travels within his homeland,
Pakistan: A Personal History provides a unique insider's view of a country unfamiliar
to a western audience. Woven into this history we see how Imran Khan's personal life -
his happy childhood in Lahore, his Oxford education, his extraordinary cricketing
career, his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, his mother's influence and that of his Islamic
faith - inform both the historical narrative and his current philanthropic and political
activities. It is at once absorbing and insightful. casting fresh light upon a country whose
culture he believes is largely misunderstood by the West.
A PesronaHli styo r
ImraKnh an
BANT AlVI PRESS
...
U»IDON • 'fOIl.(1N1'O • .� NB• Y A � • JOHANNPSBURG
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain
in 2011 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Imran Khan 2011
Imran Khan has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the
author.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446438244
ISBN 9780593067741 (hb)
9780593067758 (tpb)
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred,
distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as
specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and
conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright
law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of
the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law
accordingly.
Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk
The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009
24681097531
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Map of Pakistan
Prologue: A Coalition of the Crooked, November 2007
Chapter 1: Can I Still Play Cricket in Heaven? 1947-1979
Chapter 2: Revolution, 1979-1987
Chapter 3: Death, and Pakistan's Spiritual Life, 1987-1989
Chapter 4: Our Failed Democracy, 1988-1993
Chapter 5: 'Angels in Disguise': Building a Hospital, 1984-1995
Chapter 6: My Marriage, 1995-2004
Chapter 7: The General, 1999-2001
Chapter 8: Pakistan Since 9/11
Chapter 9: The Tribal Areas: Civil War? My Solution
Chapter 10: Rediscovering Iqbal: Pakistan's Symbol and a Template for Our Future
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Thibso oiks dedtiocS autleadi mKaans,i m,
andt hyeo utohfP akistan.

Prologue
A Coalitiooftn h eC rookeNdo,v embe2r0 07
BLANK FACES. FACES with no expressions. That's what I remember. About twenty
of them had surrounded me and a few were pushing me. I asked them, 'What is it you
want? Do you know what you are doing?' I could see some had pistols. Beyond the
locked gates of the courtyard, people were shoving and shouting. More crowds of
students peered down at me from the windows of the floors that ran round the
quadrangle as they tried to see what was happening. I was furious. My political party,
Tehreek-e-Insaf ('Movement for Justice'), was allied to this group, as the students that
had surrounded me were in the Islamic Jamiat-e-Tuleba (UT), the students' wing of the
Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's oldest and most organized religious party. Both Jamaat-e­
Islami and Tehreek-e-Insaf were part of the All Parties Democratic Movement
campaigning for an end to General Pervez Musharraf's military dictatorship and the
restoration of Pakistan's chief justice. Yet here these students were working for a
dictator who had issued orders to arrest me and behaving just like a gang of street thugs.
Although I had heard tales about the UT, I had not fully realized the kind of
people they were. Everyone on the campus of the university is scared of them. Once
known for their ideological views and great discipline, they appear to have degenerated
into a kind of mafia or fascist group operating inside the university, bearing guns and
beating people up. They stifle debate in an educational establishment that has in its time
produced two Nobel laureates -the University of the Punjab was established in the late
nineteenth century by the British, in the country's second city, Lahore. No government
dares tackle them, ordinary students at the university are petrified of them and even the
party they belong to, the Jamaat -e-Islami, does not seem to be able to control them.
Much later I heard the Jamiat activists had been paid large sums of money to turn on me
-allegedly by the government.
I knew the police would probably arrest me when I arrived at the university, so I
sneaked in the evening before and spent the night in the rooms of one of the professors.
The UT had expected me to walk through the main gate the following day with my party
supporters. Later on I discovered the plan had been to beat us all up. Two things saved
me: I surprised them by appearing alone, and from inside the university; and the
international media was there with their cameras all lined up. As soon as I appeared,
other students in the university gathered around me and hoisted me up on to their
shoulders. But then came this group of Jamiat students, about twenty or thirty of them.
They began pushing me, but they did not know what to do because they had not
expected me to come alone and there were hundreds of them watching this spectacle.
They shoved me into a quadrangle and locked the gates. That is when I kept saying,
'What is it you want?' They asked why I had come without their permission and I told
them the university did not belong to them. I asked them if they realized their party's
policy was to oppose the state of emergency Musharraf had declared and yet here they
were supporting it. 'Do you know what you are doing?' I said. There was no response. I
saw the head of the UT standing about twenty yards away and speaking on his mobile.
He was looking at me and clearly talking about me. I don't think he knew what to do.
Some professors arrived and the Jamiat youths shoved them around too and I could see
the professors were scared of them.
At this point I had been eluding arrest for almost two weeks. The country was
undergoing yet another period of turmoil and President Musharraf had declared a state
of emergency. On the evening of 3 November 2007, I had been giving a talk at the
Lahore University of Management Sciences when someone passed me a note saying that
the heads of all the political parties opposed to Musharraf were to be put under house
arrest, including me. I had already been held under house arrest the previous year when
President Bush visited Pakistan. That was aimed at stopping me staging a protest against
the US president because of his hypocrisy in supporting Musharraf, a military dictator,
while invading Iraq with the justification of installing democracy. So initially I was not
too worried. Even under house arrest, I could still manage my political party. I finished
my speech, held various meetings and returned some time after midnight to my oid
family home in Lahore's Zaman Park, where my father and younger sister lived with her
family. It was only when the police barged into our house that I began to sense a
difference. Normally the police were very polite with me. This time their manner was
more aggressive. There was no mention of house arrest, but rather of 'orders' for my
'detention'. I insisted they show me a warrant and while they went off to get it, a
journalist called me on my mobile. 'Imran, I'm sitting with the superintendent of police
here,' he said. 'All of the other political leaders have been put under house arrest, but
you are going to jail. Your orders are for jail.'
With barely minutes to spare I asked my nephew to check outside to see whether
there was any possibility of escape. He told me that while the police had surrounded
most of the house, they had left unguarded a ten-foot-high wall on the edge of our
garden. I slipped out the back and sprinted for the wall, and my nephew helped me
climb over into the garden next door. I had spent my childhood in Zaman Park and
many of my relatives still lived nearby. While the police came in and searched our
family home -even my father's bedroom, despite him being sick at the time -I made
for my grandfather's old house and from then on began moving from place to place
every other day. Every now and then I surfaced to give a telephone interview to the
press to try and get my message out to the people of Pakistan, and specifically to my
workers. Then I moved again. Two or three times the police arrived at a house to look
for me barely fifteen minutes after I had left. Later, I heard that at least five thousand
people had been detained. I was one of the last of the leading opposition politicians who
remained free. I had to organize my party as best Ic ould by word of mouth, since we
had all switched off our mobile phones and many members had gone underground.
Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the former president and prime minister of
Pakistan who had been executed in 1979 (she herself was prime minister in 1988-90 and
again in 1993-96), had recently returned from political exile. She arrived in Lahore to
organize a protest march but the police surrounded her house and the plans fizzled out.
She was, however, pursued by the international media, and I decided I should take
advantage of their presence to give myself up with as much publicity as possible. The
best place to do this was the University of the Punjab, the biggest university in the
country, where I wanted the students to mobilize against Musharraf's state of
emergency. My party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, was already popular amongst the students,
mainly because of the stand we had taken against the military dictator. The young
people of Pakistan were my main strength, and I had seen over the years how youth
across the world had played a vital role in popular campaigns, from the anti-Vietnam
War movement of 1960s America to the ousting of Indonesia's President Suharto in the
1990s and, yet to come, the Arab uprisings of 2011. I wanted the students to be
politicized, since dictators always try to depoliticize people in order to maintain control.
They and the international media would witness my arrest. I would not be taken quietly
in the night.