For millions around the world, however, none of these pictures from his later life will ever be as memorable as the spectacle of nearly 40-year-old Imran holding up the world cup that Pakistan’s cricketers had just won. That’s certainly true for me. I can vividly recall sitting on the floor on that spring day in 1992, a young boy in Kolkata, watching the charismatic team captain’s victory speech.
Since Khan was sent to jail (allegedly for corruption) by the military-dominated establishment in 2023, this once-unstoppable supply of pictures has dried up. He has been isolated and denied proper medical attention for weeks; and eventually, Pakistanis and the world have come to realize that he might now be seriously ill.
Last week, support came from an unexpected quarter. More than a dozen former cricket captains wrote to the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, asking him to ensure that his predecessor received access to medical care, more humane conditions in jail, and proper access to legal counsel. The signatories were legends of equivalent luster to Kahn from Australia, India, West Indies, England and elsewhere: Allan Border, Greg Chappell, David Gower and Clive Lloyd.
This is unprecedented. How could it not be, given that Khan himself is practically unique? Nobody else has gone from being a timeless legend in a sport played by billions to being elected to lead a country of more than 200 million. (The closest parallel I can think of is the soccer player George Weah, who won the Ballon d’Or in 1995 before serving six years as president of Liberia.)
Khan’s cricket career was the foundation of, and in some ways predicted, his time in politics. The world cup victory came late, 21 years after a long-haired schoolboy burst on the scene in the 1970s. In 1996, he established a party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf; they spent 22 years in the political wilderness before being swept dramatically into power.
Khan was controversial in both sport and politics. The magic that he and his Pakistan teammates performed on the field in the 1970s and 1980s was, many argued, the product of surreptitious tampering with the ball. Similarly, his sudden dominance of his country’s politics was in no small degree a consequence of the all-powerful military eventually putting a hand on the electoral scales in his favor.
And in that world cup victory speech we listened to so raptly three decades ago, Khan famously forgot to mention his teammates — indeed, he used “I” throughout, not “we.” That is how, as his country’s most successful populist, he ran his party and government as well.
Indeed, any sympathy one feels for Khan, now 73, is in spite of his political career and not because of it. He might not have spoken a word against the treatment he’s now receiving had it been one of his political adversaries in jail instead.
But whatever you say about Imran — and I have said plenty — it’s hard to deny that the conditions of his imprisonment seem inhumane and unfair. They are, as the captains say in their letter, unjust and undignified. They’re an offense against the spirit of sportsmanship, of fair play, of decency and dignity; the very qualities that cricket believes that it exemplifies above all other sports.
The two Indian captains who signed, Khan’s rivals and contemporaries Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev, probably didn’t hesitate a moment to lend their names to the letter — even though the two countries define themselves by their mutual rivalry in politics and in sport. But rivalry, the letter said, should end when a match does.
Cricket, the game that spread from the village greens of England to the vast stadiums of the subcontinent, is a propagandist for its values of old-school fair play. Those who walk off the field even when the umpire’s decision is in their favor are lionized, not mocked. What the captains’ letter said about ensuring the dignity of your rivals is also, in some ways, a cricketing virtue. The subcontinent, which has made the sport its own, should also adopt some of these values into its politics.
