Biography of Imran Khan

Imran Khan, in full Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi, (born

October 5, 1952, Lahore,
Pakistan), Pakistani cricket player, politician,
philanthropist, and prime minister of Pakistan (2018–
22) who became a national hero by leading Pakistan’s
national team to a Cricket World Cup victory in 1992
and later entered politics as a critic of government
corruption in Pakistan.
Early life and cricket career: Khan was born into
an affluent Pashtun family in Lahore and was educated
at elite schools in Pakistan and the United Kingdom,
including the Royal Grammar School in Worcester and
Aitchison College in Lahore. There were several
accomplished cricket players in his family, including
two elder cousins, Javed Burki and Majid Khan, who
both served as captains of the Pakistani national team.
Imran Khan played cricket in Pakistan and the United
Kingdom in his teens and continued playing while
studying philosophy, politics, and economics at the
University of Oxford. Khan played his first match for
Pakistan’s national team in 1971, but he did not take a
permanent place on the team until after his graduation
from Oxford in 1976. By the early 1980s Khan had
distinguished himself as an exceptional bowler and all-
rounder, and he was named captain of the Pakistani
team in 1982. Khan’s athletic talent and good looks
made him a celebrity in Pakistan and England, and his
regular appearances at fashionable London nightclubs
provided fodder for the British tabloid press. In 1992
Khan achieved his greatest athletic success when he
led the Pakistani team to its first World Cup title,
defeating England in the final. He retired that same
year, having secured a reputation as one of the
greatest cricket players in history.
After 1992 Khan remained in the public eye as a
philanthropist. He experienced a religious awakening,
embracing Sufi mysticism and shedding his earlier
playboy image. In one of his philanthropic endeavours,
Khan acted as the primary fund-raiser for the Shaukat
Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, a specialized cancer
hospital in Lahore, which opened in 1994. The hospital
was named after Khan’s mother, who had died of
cancer in 1985.
Entry into politics: After his retirement from cricket,
Khan became an outspoken critic of government
mismanagement and corruption in Pakistan. He
founded his own political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-
Insaf (Pakistan Justice Movement; PTI), in 1996. In
national elections held the following year, the newly
formed party won less than 1 percent of the vote and
failed to win any seats in the National Assembly, but it
fared slightly better in the 2002 elections, winning a
single seat that Khan filled. Khan maintained that vote
rigging was to blame for his party’s low vote totals. In
October 2007 Khan was among a group of politicians
who resigned from the National Assembly, protesting
Pres. Pervez Musharraf’s candidacy in the upcoming
presidential election. In November Khan was briefly
imprisoned during a crackdown against critics of
Musharraf, who had declared a state of emergency. The
PTI condemned the state of emergency, which ended in
mid-December, and boycotted the 2008 national
elections to protest Musharraf’s rule.

In spite of the PTI’s struggles in elections,

Khan’s populist positions found support, especially
among young people. He continued his criticism of
corruption and economic inequality in Pakistan and
opposed the Pakistani government’s cooperation with
the United States in fighting militants near the Afghan
border. He also launched broadsides against Pakistan’s
political and economic elites, whom he accused of
being Westernized and out of touch with Pakistan’s
religious and cultural norms.
Khan’s writings included Warrior Race: A Journey
Through the Land of the Tribal Pathans (1993)
and Pakistan: A Personal History (2011).
Political ascent: In the months leading up to the
legislative elections scheduled for early 2013, Khan and
his party drew large crowds at rallies and attracted the
support of several veteran politicians from Pakistan’s
established parties. Further evidence of Khan’s rising
political fortunes came in the form of an opinion poll in
2012 that found him to be the most popular political
figure in Pakistan.

Just days before legislative elections in May 2013, Khan

injured his head and back when he fell from a platform
at a campaign rally. He appeared on television from his
hospital bed hours later to make a final appeal to
voters. The elections produced the PTI’s highest
totals yet, but the party still won less than half the
number of seats won by the Pakistan Muslim League–
Nawaz (PML-N), led by Nawaz Sharif. Khan accused the
PML-N of rigging the elections. After his calls for an
investigation went unmet, he and other opposition
leaders led four months of protests in late 2014 in order
to pressure Sharif to step down.
The protests failed to oust Sharif, but suspicions of
corruption were amplified when the Panama
Papers linked his family to offshore holdings. Khan
organized a new set of protests in late 2016 but called
them off at the last minute after the Supreme Court
agreed to open an investigation. The investigation
disqualified Sharif from holding public office in 2017,
and he was forced to resign from office. Khan,
meanwhile, was also revealed to have had offshore
holdings but, in a separate case, was not disqualified by
the Supreme Court.
Elections were held the following year, in July 2018.
Khan ran on a platform of fighting corruption and
poverty, even as he had to fight off accusations that he
was too cozy with the military establishment. The PTI
won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly,
allowing Khan to seek a coalition with independent
members of the parliament. He became prime minister
on August 18.
Premiership: As prime minister, Khan faced a
mounting balance-of-payments crisis. Though the
economy was experiencing growth, imports and debt
commitments from before his term had skyrocketed in
recent years, especially because of the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative. Just weeks into his
term as prime minister, the crisis worsened when the
United States withheld $300 million in promised
military aid, saying Pakistan had not done enough to
stem terrorism. Khan attempted to seek foreign
aid from “friendly countries” first; because a dozen
previous packages from the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) had failed to solve Pakistan’s
macroeconomic problems, his avoidance of an IMF
bailout reflected popular fatigue with the IMF. After he
was unable to secure foreign aid on favourable
conditions from other countries, however, Pakistan
submitted a request for emergency lending from the
IMF. He continued to seek foreign aid from other
sources and later received promises of investments
from China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab
Emirates.

Aside from courting foreign aid, Khan xoversaw several

significant developments in Pakistan’s foreign relations.
The country successfully brought the Taliban to
negotiations with the United States, improving relations
with the country and with neighbouring Afghanistan. In
February 2019, in a show of force against militants
in Kashmir, who had recently staged a suicide attack
killing 40 Indian security personnel, India launched an
air assault in Pakistan for the first time in five decades,
raising fears of a new conflict between the two
countries. Pakistan downplayed the impact and
appeared to avoid escalating the situation. When India
again entered Pakistan’s air space, Pakistan shot down
two fighter jets and captured a pilot but returned the
pilot to India soon afterward. After the incident,
Khan implemented a crackdown on militants, issuing
arrests, closing a large number of religious schools, and
promising to update existing laws to reflect
international standards.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020,
aggravated the country’s economic woes. Relative to
his critics, Khan was slow to endorse a lockdown. In
contrast, the provincial government in Sindh, controlled
by an opposition party, was quick to implement a strict
lockdown in March. Khan eventually imposed a
nationwide lockdown in April; in May his government
began restricting lockdowns to localities with high
infection rates.
Meanwhile, Khan continued to face opposition for his
close relationship with the military establishment, his
crackdown on militants, and the fragile state of the
economy. In late 2020 the major opposition parties
formed a coalition, the People’s Democratic Movement
(PDM), with the stated goal of increasing the
independence of civilian government from the military
establishment. Protests and rallies organized by the
PDM accused Khan of being a puppet of the army and
called on him to step down. In March 2021 these
parties boycotted a vote of confidence initiated by
Khan’s government, which he survived narrowly with
the support of his coalition partners. Later that year
Khan fell out with the military establishment after a
failed attempt by Khan to influence its top posts. As
frustrations rose over sustained inflation, the opposition
moved in March 2022 to hold its own vote of
confidence; key allies of the PTI withdrew from the
ruling coalition, and several members of the party also
defected. The vote was held, and on April 10 Khan
became the first prime minister in Pakistan’s history to
be removed by a no-confidence measure.