The captain cricket won’t let go

There was something appropriate about the setting.

At Lord’s, the headquarters of cricket’s old establishment, England and Pakistan were playing a Test match when rain interrupted the proceedings. During the lunch interval, Sky Sports broadcast an interview with Sulaiman and Kasim Khan, the two sons of Pakistan's most famous cricketer. Their father was not there; Imran Khan has been in prison in Pakistan for nearly three years.

The interviewer was Michael Atherton, former England captain and one of the most respected cricket broadcasters of his generation. The subject was not cricket in the conventional sense. It was Imran Khan’s health, his conditions in prison and the family’s efforts to secure what they regard as proper medical attention for him.

Kasim Khan said that his father had lost about 80 percent of the sight in one eye and had recently been seen wearing an eye patch. The brothers also alleged that he was being kept alone for more than 23 hours a day, with restricted access to books and basic comforts. They spoke of his deteriorating physical and mental condition. These remain the family’s allegations, rather than independently established facts. The Pakistani authorities have rejected claims of mistreatment and have said that Khan has received medical attention and extensive access to visitors.

Kasim then made the most serious allegation of all. He said that the authorities were “blatantly trying to kill him”.

That is not a fact. It is the assessment of a son who believes his father is being subjected to intolerable conditions. It nevertheless made for extraordinary television because the family was speaking about the physical vulnerability of a man whose public image had for decades been built around physical authority, stamina and command.

The Pakistan Cricket Board objected to the broadcast. According to ESPNcricinfo, the PCB complained to Sky Sports and considered whether Pakistan’s players should return to the field after lunch if the interview was broadcast. Sky went ahead with the programme. The Pakistani players returned for the afternoon session, and the Test continued. The PCB subsequently lodged a formal complaint.

The PCB’s attempt to stop the interview from being broadcast made the episode considerably larger than a family appeal. Pakistan's cricket administration had become part of a controversy surrounding the treatment of the man who did more than almost anybody else to turn Pakistan cricket into a national mythology.

That is where the story becomes larger than Imran Khan.

It’s all in the eyes

There is a danger in the mythology surrounding Imran Khan of allowing the extraordinary captain to obscure the extraordinary cricketer who preceded him. Imran was not always the finished fast-bowling all-rounder of the 1980s and early 1990s. He began as a relatively raw bowler and gradually developed himself into a genuinely quick and highly accomplished exponent of swing. His batting underwent a similar transformation. He moved from being a useful lower-order batsman to becoming a formidable all-rounder who could change the course of a Test match with either discipline.

Sanjay Manjrekar recalled a remarkable moment from India’s 1989 tour of Pakistan that captures another side of this transformation. By then, Manjrekar recalled, Imran had lost much of the pace that had once made him such a feared bowler. Yet the Indian players never felt that they could take advantage of him, either with the ball or in the field. Manjrekar remembered long, tiring days when India could be piling on the runs, but Imran never seemed to lose his concentration. “His eyes were always focused on what was happening on the field,” he wrote in Imperfect.

That observation acquires an almost unsettling resonance today. In August, Pakistani prison authorities told the Supreme Court that Imran’s right eye, affected by central retinal vein occlusion, had improved and that his vision was “almost normal”. His family and political supporters have disputed the adequacy and independence of the medical care he has received.

The eye that Manjrekar remembered as a symbol of Imran’s extraordinary concentration has consequently become part of the controversy surrounding his imprisonment. There is an unintended irony in it. For much of his cricketing life, Imran’s gaze seemed to represent an absolute refusal to let his attention wander from the contest. Today, the condition of that eye has become one of the things the world is watching.

That evolution says something important about Imran Khan. He was an unusually self-fashioned figure. The cricketer remade himself, then the cricketer became a captain, philanthropist and politician. The self-belief that made those transformations possible could look like leadership when it succeeded and hubris when it did not.

Imran Khan does not need to be rehabilitated as a politician for the present cricketing solidarity to make sense.

Ally, then adversary

His political record is deeply contradictory. He founded Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in 1996 and spent more than two decades presenting himself as the outsider who would cleanse Pakistan of its corrupt political elite. His electoral breakthrough came in 2018 amid widespread accusations from his opponents that the military establishment had helped create a political environment favourable to him. Subsequent scholarship has also examined the military’s role in his rise. His relationship with the establishment later deteriorated dramatically.

It is important, though, to correct one common simplification. Imran was not removed in an army coup. In April 2022, Parliament voted him out in a no-confidence motion after coalition partners defected and he lost the backing of the military establishment. The Supreme Court had also ruled that his attempt to dissolve Parliament and prevent the vote was unconstitutional.

That history makes the present symbolism more complicated, not less.

Imran Khan had been, at one stage, a beneficiary of the Pakistani power structure. He later became one of its most formidable antagonists.

Something quite different has happened in cricket.

The man who once concentrated Pakistan’s cricketing identity around himself has, three decades later, become a figure through whom an unusually broad section of the international cricket fraternity is expressing concern about arbitrary power, institutional overreach and the treatment of a former colleague.

Imran Khan became a particular kind of Pakistani ideal. He was exceptionally talented, physically imposing, articulate in English, educated at Aitchison and Oxford, experienced in English county cricket and comfortable in the international world. He belonged to an elite social universe but could present himself as the man who would impose discipline upon a chaotic national institution.

His leadership credentials were therefore never understood purely through cricket. Shoaib Akhtar, a cricketer of a later generation, offered a revealing insight into the way Imran’s authority was perceived. Akhtar associated Imran’s leadership with his class, articulation, vision and Oxford education. That admiration went beyond cricketing ability. It reflected the prestige that elite education, particularly an institution such as Oxford, could carry in Pakistani society.

Imran had the confidence, international experience, social pedigree and public fluency to inhabit that role naturally. He could speak to the drawing rooms of Lahore, the cricket grounds of England and the mass political imagination of Pakistan.

1992 and its aftermath

The 1992 World Cup transformed all of it into something approaching national sanctity. Pakistan had won its first men’s World Cup. Imran, captain at the age of 39, had led the team through an improbable campaign. His retirement followed soon afterwards. The country had not simply acquired a World Cup-winning captain.

It had acquired a national hero. 

There is an irony here. The Imran Khan who has become a symbol of resistance to arbitrary power was himself an unusually personalised leader. He did not believe in leaving cricket entirely to administrators. His authority within Pakistan's cricket establishment was enormous. He could be demanding, interventionist, and fiercely protective of his vision for what Pakistan cricket should become.

His approach had real consequences. He helped build a team that was more confident, more aggressive and less willing to accept the traditional hierarchy of international cricket. Pakistan’s emergence as a serious cricketing power owed much to his force of personality. It also meant that the distinction between the team and its captain could become blurred. That was characteristic of Imran. He did not simply lead institutions. He often became their embodiment.

The 1992 World Cup reinforced that mythology.

Even in his post-match speech, when Pakistan had just achieved the greatest prize in its cricketing history, Imran spoke extensively about his ambition to build a cancer hospital in memory of his mother. The emphasis could appear strikingly personal at a moment that belonged to an entire team.

Yet that criticism has to be balanced against what followed.

Imran subsequently built the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore, using his enormous public reputation to raise money for it. The World Cup victory became part of a much larger philanthropic mission. That achievement is crucial to understanding him. The same self-belief that could look like egotism could also produce extraordinary institutional achievement. His transition from cricket to politics did not require him to invent an entirely new persona. The captain became a politician. The cricketing language of discipline became the political language about corruption.

The insistence that Pakistan could defeat supposedly superior opponents became the claim that Pakistan could defeat its entrenched political class. The national hero became the man who promised to rescue Pakistan. Here too, however, the story is far less morally tidy than the mythology that surrounds him today.

The relationship between Khan and the military later broke down, producing one of the most consequential political confrontations in Pakistan's recent history. To understand why the reversal has been so dramatic, it helps to look beyond the personalities.

How power works in Pakistan 

Pakistan’s political order has historically been shaped by an unusual combination of civilian electoral politics, landed and dynastic elites, a powerful bureaucracy, and an exceptionally autonomous military establishment. “Feudal democracy” is a useful phrase only if it is used carefully. Pakistan is not simply a feudal society in which landlords dictate everything. Urbanisation, industrialisation, the growth of the middle class and new forms of political mobilisation have transformed the country. Patronage politics, however, remains important.

Dynastic politics, biradari networks, landed influence and the distribution of state resources have all shaped electoral politics. Political parties have often operated through networks of patronage and clientelism as much as through modern ideological organisation.

The old arrangement was therefore not simply a contest between feudal politicians and the army but was considerably more complicated. Landed elites, political parties, business interests, bureaucrats, military institutions and intelligence agencies have competed and cooperated within a state whose democratic institutions have struggled to become fully autonomous.

The Pakistani state was exceptionally bureaucratic from the beginning. Senior civil servants acquired considerable influence during the country's formative years. Over time, however, the balance shifted. The military became the dominant institution.

The army consequently became something more than an armed force. It became an arbiter, sometimes openly, often behind the scenes. Sometimes creating political space for a civilian government, sometimes destroying it. Pakistan’s politics acquired a rhythm in which civilian authority could operate at the front while the ultimate boundaries of political possibility were often established elsewhere. That is why the reversal involving Imran Khan has such force. Imran Khan was almost perfectly adapted to this system.

He possessed elite credentials without belonging to the traditional political dynasties of the PPP or PML-N. He could speak the language of modernity while retaining enormous symbolic legitimacy among conservative and traditional sections of Pakistan. In later years, he tilted more towards a traditionalist view of Pakistan’s public ethos and cultural fabric.

He was internationally recognised without being perceived simply as a Westernised politician. Above all, he had something no conventional Pakistani politician possessed. He had the authority of the national sports icon, something that survived his political failures.

Why are cricket’s captains speaking up?

In public memory, his prime ministership may have swung from disillusionment and berating to mild approval, but the image of the fighting skipper of the 1992 World Cup team survives. The extraordinary interventions of Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Dilip Vengsarkar, Greg Chappell, Ian Chappell, Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Clive Lloyd, Mike Atherton and other former international captains make sense in this context. They are not issuing a judicial judgment on Pakistan's corruption cases or endorsing PTI. They are invoking another Imran, their rival – the captain, the fast-bowling all-rounder. The man who belonged to the same international cricketing fraternity.

In February, 14 former international captains appealed for humane treatment and proper medical care for Khan. In August, that appeal was renewed and expanded to 22 former captains, including Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Dilip Vengsarkar and the Chappell brothers. Their intervention is powerful precisely because it is narrower than a political endorsement. They are not saying that Imran Khan was right about Pakistan. They are saying that whatever his politics, he should receive proper medical care and humane treatment.

The participation of Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev carries particular weight because their cricketing relationship with Imran belongs to an era when India and Pakistan cricket was intensely competitive, but the players also knew one another intimately. Gavaskar has known Imran since Imran was a teenager. Kapil and Imran were parallel figures: fast-bowling all-rounders, captains, national icons, and men who eventually became much larger than the game.

Their intervention therefore has a moral vocabulary that politicians cannot easily reproduce. A political party can be accused of taking sides. A former rival can say something different. That is what gives the cricketing appeal its peculiar legitimacy.

What the PCB’s objections revealed

The PCB’s reaction made the story bigger. 

Had Sky simply broadcast the interview, it would have been one more international report about Imran Khan’s imprisonment. Once the cricket board objected, and reports emerged that it had considered keeping Pakistan's players off the field, the question changed. Why was a cricket board so concerned about an interview with the sons of a former captain? Why should a Test match become entangled in a dispute because a broadcaster allowed a former captain’s children to discuss their father's health? And why does the identity of a former cricketer remain so powerful that his sons’ interview can become a matter of cricketing diplomacy?

Imran has never occupied only one identity. He is the former prime minister. He is the imprisoned former prime minister facing convictions that he and his supporters say are politically motivated. He is the 1992 World Cup captain, the philanthropist, the Oxford-educated Pakistani elite figure. Moreover, he is the populist challenger to the political establishment.

In many ways, he is also a man whose treatment in prison has become a test of Pakistan’s relationship with its own institutions. The fact that the PCB is headed by Mohsin Naqvi, who is also Pakistan's interior minister, makes the intersection between cricket administration and political authority particularly conspicuous. In a certain way Imran attempted to cast Pakistan cricket in his own image. That seems ironic in hindsight. He carried the authority of his class, his education, his international experience and his extraordinary sporting achievement. Later, he attempted to personalise Pakistani politics around himself. Now the logic has reversed. The personalised leader has become the individual around whom others are demanding that institutions observe limits.

That is why his cricketing colleagues matter. Gavaskar and Kapil Dev are not merely Indian sports celebrities intervening in Pakistani politics. They are members of the generation that knew Imran before he became a political enemy of Pakistan’s establishment. Greg and Ian Chappell do not have to believe that Imran Khan was an exemplary democratic leader. Michael Atherton does not have to become a PTI partisan. The former captains are not being asked to adjudicate the corruption cases against him. They are making a narrower humanitarian argument. A man can be politically ambitious, egotistical, contradictory and opportunistic, and can face serious criminal convictions, while still possessing the right to proper medical care and humane treatment.

The cricketing world is using the memory of the cricketer to insist that the politician, whatever his faults, whatever his convictions and whatever the verdicts against him, still has to be treated as a human being. At Lord’s, during a rain interruption in a Test match between England and Pakistan, that old cricketing memory crossed the boundary into the present.

The episode may ultimately prove more revealing about Imran Khan’s place in Pakistani life than another parliamentary vote or another courtroom verdict. The man who once stood at the centre of Pakistan cricket has become, in his absence, the question that Pakistan cricket cannot quite keep outside the boundary. 

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