From fair play to foul

Imran Khan as a cricketer and Imran Khan as a politician are two starkly opposite personalities — in terms of overall conduct that involves attitude, approach, contribution, performance, legacy, etc. An ardent fan of cricket since being a kid, I have seen Khan start out, grow, excel… and depart. Likewise, I have keenly followed his whole political journey since his entry into politics in 1996.

While Khan, the cricketer, is doubtlessly the envy of the whole nation; Khan, the politician, is hero for some and villain for others.

What was it that made Cricketer Khan a darling of the whole country? No, it was not just his achievements. As I see it, Khan had three distinct qualities that helped him rank above the greatest of the great in cricket. Let’s examine these three qualities one by one.

1) A tainted victory was what Khan hated the most. He always wanted to win fair and square and could never see his victories contaminated with allegations of bias and cheating. That was why he introduced neutral umpires in cricket — in a home Test series against West Indies in 1986. Thus the first-ever Test match in the history of cricket to have been supervised by umpires from a third country happened on the Pakistani soil — courtesy Khan’s principled penchant for fairness. It then did not take too long for neutral umpiring to become a norm in cricket.

That was not it. So obsessed was Khan with fair play that he was never ever comfortable with celebrating even a single wicket that had become controversial. A well-known case in point is the dismissal of India’s Kris Srikkanth in an ODI during the 1989 tour of India to Pakistan. On being adjudged LBW off an express in-swinger from Waqar Younis, Srikkanth started walking back in dejection, protesting the umpire’s decision through his body language. It was there that Khan invited Srikkanth to bat again, forcing the umpire to change his decision in a one-of-its-kind event in the history of cricket. Srikkanth took the crease again, but was out caught behind the very next ball — only to depart the field, sheepishly nodding his head in acknowledgment of a fair dismissal. More than being an unparalleled display of sportsman spirit, Srikkanth’s two lifelines in a single inning came in compliance with Khan’s principle of keeping his victories untainted.

2) Khan never enjoyed beating a weak opponent as if it was an insult to his sporting prowess. To him, a victory only meant thrashing an opponent on his own turf. That’s why it was only the away-encounters that mattered to him. Right through his 21-year-long cricket career, he targeted hammering Indians in India and Englishmen in England — and quite successfully at that. The World Cup victory under him also came in Australia, the toughest of the cricket fields in the world.

3) Humble, decent, sober was how Khan would behave on the field. His wicket-taking celebrations used to be the most modest — as if no big feat. He was never seen punching into the air or kicking the ground or performing a celebratory dance even on sending any danger-man back to the pavilion. And while Team Pakistan erupted in uncontrollable jubilation on winning the 1992 World Cup, the skipper was as modest as ever, only sporting smiles of gratitude. To Khan, the sky was the limit when it came to achievements. No wonder he was seldom found taking credit for so many of his on-field exploits that others would leave no chance to keep bragging about.

The historic World Cup win capped Khan’s illustrious 21-year-long cricket career which was brimful of exciting records and splendid achievements, besides being a marvel of exemplary leadership.

A few years after his swansong in sports, Khan — carrying an image of a clean, decent, daring, hardworking and ambitious individual — entered the muddy puddle of politics.

Unlike in cricket though, success was not to come to him easily in the much bigger and trickier game of politics. He suffered failures after failures for a decade after the launch of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in April 1996. But his never-say-die resolve did eventually pay off, and he became a force to reckon. PTI’s Minar-e-Pakistan rally of October 30, 2011 proved that Khan was no more a political nobody.

However, Khan still lacked enough mass support to rise to power while the 2013 election was approaching. To fill the gap, the establishment was ready to extend a helping hand. That was where Khan’s persistence with the three golden principles that lit up his cricket career — his fixation with fair play; his can-do spirit buoying him up against any challenge, any opponent; and, his determined but decent self, hardly ever boasting about his achievements or taking credit for them — came under a serious test.

Temptation for power is irresistible. While Khan did seem pulled in, he did not get carried away completely. However, the establishment’s interest in Khan was a signal good enough for many an ‘electable’ to join the PTI. Still, it was no gate-crash as he wanted to count on his growing popularity to lead him to the helm. The need for funds “for a good cause” then compelled him to rope in a couple of ATMs. A few more, symbolising the forces of status quo, also found room to sneak in. A new King’s Party was clearly in the making.

Come the 2013 election and PML-N rose to power. Given the historic turnout at his election rallies, Khan was so confident of his victory that it was too difficult a setback for him to swallow. He was not ready to take the defeat lying down. His fiercely ambitious self was provoking him into foul play — in deviation from his long-held principles of fairness and sportsman spirit. A cue from the hidden forces — also unhappy with the election results — triggered him on to the streets in protest. He demanded that PM Nawaz Sharif resign. Camped in the heart of the capital city along with his followers, Khan waited no less than 126 days for the umpire’s finger to rise in his favour, but the numbers at the agitation were small enough to provide regime-change justification to the powers-that-be. The sit-in thus failed.

Still, Khan was not ready to give up. His failure had bruised his ego. His passion had turned into anger, and anger into hatred. He wanted the PM out at any cost. Thanks to the Panama Papers leaks, Khan — helped by powerful institutions — did eventually send the PM packing in July 2017.

The election 2018 was only a year away; and Khan did not want anything to come between him and the helm. The doors of his PTI were now open to all good, bad and ugly politicians to get in. The electables not willing to join what was now the King’s Party were either being harassed through court cases or enticed with lucrative offers. As if pre-poll political engineering was not enough, poll-day rigging, through RTS, ensured that Khan rose to power — at last.

In the process though, he sacrificed his three golden principles.

= One who never accepted a single controversial wicket in his entire cricket career did not bother about calls for probing the dubious RTS collapse and preferred being labelled a ‘selected PM’. He even tried to scuttle a no-trust vote against his PMship in sheer defiance of the Constitution.

= One who never relished fighting a weak opponent on cricket field connived with institutions to put his political rivals in jail so as to clear the field of any formidable challenge to his re-election, and unleashed his ‘keyboard warriors’ to silence his media critics.

= And one who never felt fulfilled even on his coveted sporting exploits and kept pushing the performance bar higher for himself, cheaply “felt like winning the World Cup” on rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump on his maiden US visit as PM, seemed over the moon on clinching ordinary economic targets, and kept drumming about his so-called achievements and pedaling fake political narratives as part of well-orchestrated propaganda campaigns.

Out of the PM House now, Khan may rise to power again. But what political legacy is he going to leave? Of a traditional politician? Khan played the game of cricket with honesty, integrity, grace and humility. Had he conducted himself similarly in politics, he would have left an indelible mark on the country’s political landscape, even if he had never become the PM.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 28^th, 2022.

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