Imran Khan
Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi HI PP is the 22nd and current Prime Minister of Pakistan and the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Before entering politics, Khan was an international cricketer and captain of the Pakistan national cricket team, which led to victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup.
Khan was born to a Pashtun family in Lahore in 1952 and graduated from Keble College, Oxford in 1975. He began his international cricket career at age 18, in the 1971 Test series against England. Khan played until 1992, served as the team's captain intermittently between 1982 and 1992, and won the Cricket World Cup, in what is Pakistan's first and only victory in the competition. Considered one of Pakistan's greatest ever all-rounders, Khan registered 3,807 runs and took 362 wickets in Test cricket and was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.
In 1991, he launched a fundraising campaign to set up a cancer hospital in memory of his mother. He raised $25 million to set up a hospital in Lahore in 1994 and set up a second hospital in Peshawar in 2015.[19] Khan then continued his philanthropic efforts, expanding the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital to also include a research center, and founded Namal College in 2008. Khan also served as the chancellor of the University of Bradford between 2005 and 2014 and was the recipient of an honorary fellowship by the Royal College of Physicians in 2012.
Khan founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in 1996 and serves as the party's national leader. By winning a seat in the National Assembly in 2002, he served as an opposition member from Mianwali until 2007. PTI boycotted the 2008 general election and became the second-largest party by popular vote in the subsequent election. In regional politics, PTI led a coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from 2013, with Khan delegating this leadership to Mahmood Khan after being elected as Prime Minister in 2018.
As Prime Minister, Khan addressed a balance of payments crisis with a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. He also presided over a shrinking current account deficit and limited military spending to curtail the fiscal deficit. Khan launched an anti-corruption campaign but was criticized by political opponents for alleged targeting. In other domestic policy, Khan pushed for an increase in renewable energy production with an aim to make Pakistan mostly renewable by 2030. He also initiated reforestation and the expansion of national parks. He enacted a policy that increased tax collection and investment. Khan's government also instituted reforms to education and healthcare on a national and regional level respectively. In foreign policy, he dealt with border skirmishes against India, supported the Afghan peace process, strengthened relations with China and the United States, and improved Pakistan's reputation abroad.[45]
Imran Khan: Childhood and Education
Khan is the son of Shaukat Khanum and Ikramullah Khan Niazi, a civil engineer from Lahore. He grew up as the only son in the family with four sisters. The family-based in the province of Punjab comes from the Pashtun tribe Niazi, sub-tribe Sherman Khel, from Mianwali. He himself describes his identity as Pashtun, although he is only distantly related to this person, and discusses this affiliation in detail in his book Warrior Race: A Journey Through the Land of the Tribal Pathans. His maternal family members include a wide variety of cricketers, including his cousins Javed Burki (1938) and Majid Khan, who were both captains of the Pakistani national team.
Khan began his education at Aitchison College Lahore and the Cathedral School in Lahore. After middle school, he went to England and attended the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, where he excelled in cricket. In 1972 he studied politics and economics at Keble College in Oxford and in 1974 was captain of the Oxford cricket team.
Imran Khan: Cricket career
| Player information | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Surname | Imran Khan Niazi | |||
| Born | November 25, 1952 (age 67) Lahore, Pakistan | |||
| Batting style | Right-handed | |||
| Bowling style | Right-handed almost bowler | |||
| Player role | All-rounder | |||
| International games | ||||
| National team | Pakistan | |||
| Test debut (cap 65) | 3rd June 1971 v England | |||
| Last test | 7th January 1992 v Sri Lanka | |||
| ODI debut (cap 12) | 31st August 1974 v England | |||
| Last ODI | 5th October 1992 v England | |||
| National teams | ||||
| Years | team | |||
| 1969-1971 | Lahore | |||
| 1971-1976 | Worcestershire County Cricket Club | |||
| 1973-1975 | Oxford University Cricket Club | |||
| 1975-1981 | Pakistan International Airlines | |||
| 1977-1988 | Sussex County Cricket Club | |||
| 1984-1985 | New South Wales Blues | |||
| Career statistics | ||||
| Game form | test | ODI | FC | LA |
| Games | 88 | 175 | 382 | 425 |
| Runs (total) | 3.807 | 3.709 | 17.771 | 10.100 |
| Batting average | 37.69 | 33.41 | 36.79 | 33.22 |
| 100s / 50s | 6/18 | 1/19 | 30/93 | 5/66 |
| High score | 136 | 102 * | 170 | 114 * |
| Balls | 19,458 | 7.461 | 65.224 | 19.122 |
| Wickets | 362 | 182 | 1.287 | 507 |
| Bowling Average | 22.81 | 26.61 | 22.32 | 22.31 |
| 5 wickets in innings | 23 | 1 | 70 | 6th |
| 10 wickets in play | 6th | - | 13 | - |
| Best bowling performance | 8/58 | 6/14 | 8/34 | 6/14 |
| Catches / stumpings | 28 / - | 36 / - | 117 / - | 84 / - |
Sixteen-year-old Khan's debut in first-class cricket in Lahore was rather unremarkable. At the beginning of the 1970s, he played for the teams in his hometown: Lahore A (1969/70), Lahore B (1969/70), Lahore Greens (1970/71), and finally Lahore (1970/71). Khan was a player on the Oxford cricket team from 1973 to 1975, and in 1974 he was the captain of the university team. In Worcestershire, where he played county cricket from 1971 to 1976, he was only rated as the average medium pace bowler. During this decade, Khan also played for other cricket teams, including Dawood Industries (1975/76) and Pakistan International Airlines (from 1975/76 to 1980/81). In 1983 he went to Sussex and played there until 1988.
In 1971 Khan made his debut in Test cricket against England in Birmingham. Three years later he made his debut in a One-Day International, also against England in Nottingham, and subsequently took part in the 1975 Cricket World Cup. After graduating from Oxford and the expiry of his employment in Worcestershire, he returned to Pakistan in 1976 and secured himself a permanent place in his national team with the games against New Zealand and Australia since the 1976/77 season.
After the games in Australia, he visited the West Indies cricket team, where Tony Greig met him for Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket took them under contract. Under the care of John Snow and Mike Procter, he changed his bowling style from the javelin-like movement of the early 1970s to a sideways stance where the chest and hips form a 90-degree angle to the batsman when the ball was thrown. His reputation as one of the bowlers with the hardest throw in the world arose when he took third place in fast bowling in 1978 at 139.7 km / h-Competition in Perth behind Jeff Thomson and Michael Holding, but ahead of Dennis Lillee, Garth Le Roux, and Andy Roberts.
Khan achieved the all-rounders triple (3,000 runs and 300 wickets) in 75 tests, the second-best number after Ian Botham, who needed 72 tests. He still holds the second-best batting average of 61.86 as a batsman in the 6th position in the hit order in test matches. In January 1992 he played his last test match for Pakistan against Sri Lanka in Faisalabad. His last one-day international was the historic final of the 1992 Cricket World Cup against England in Melbourne, which can be seen as the culmination of Khan's career.
Khan ended his career with 88 test matches, 126 innings, and 3807 runs (corresponding to a batting average of 37.69), including six centuries and 18 half-centuries. His highest score is 136 runs. As a bowler in test matches, he scored 362 wickets, making him the first Pakistani and fourth bowler ever to achieve this number. In ODIs, his best bowling is 6 wickets for 14 runs. Khan retired permanently from cricket in September 1992, six months after the 1992 World Cup final.
The time as captain of the Pakistani national team
At the height of his career in 1982, the thirty-year-old Khan took over from Javed Miandad as the captain of the Pakistani national cricket team. In the second game of the Pakistani team with captain Khan, he led them to their first victory in 28 years on English soil, at Lord’s.
Khan's first year as captain laid the foundation for his reputation as a fast bowler and an all-rounder. In 1981/82 he achieved the best bowling of his career in test matches with eight wickets for 58 runs against Sri Lanka in Lahore. In1982 he led with 21 wickets and a batting average of 56 both the bowling and the batting statistics in a series of three test matches against England. Later that year, with 40 wickets and a bowling average of 13.95 in six test matches, he showed a highly recognized performance in a home series against the strong Indian national cricket team. At the end of this series in 1982/83, Khan scored 88 wickets in 13 test matches after a year as captain.
However, the test series against India resulted in a stress fracture in his shin in Khan that kept him from cricket for more than two years. Only a new type of treatment, financed by the Pakistani government, led to his recovery and so he was able to celebrate a successful comeback in international cricket in the last half of the 1984/85 seasons at the end of 1984.
In 1987 Khan led his Pakistani side to their first test series win in India, followed by their first Pakistani win in England that same year. During the 1980s, his team also scored three notable draws against the West Indies. India and Pakistan co-hosted the Cricket World Cup in 1987, but neither team made it through the semi-finals. At the end of the World Cup, Khan retired from international cricket. In 1988 he was asked by the President of Pakistan, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, to return to the role of captain, and on January 18, 1988, he announced his decision to return to the team.
Shortly after his return as captain, he took Pakistan on a victorious tour of the West Indies that he remembers as his proudest moment in cricket. He achieved 23 wickets in 3 test matches and was named the 1988 series player against the West Indies. He later recalls: “I was 35 and not very fit, we had a pretty weak team and then I got 11 wickets in the first test. That was the last time I bowled really well. ” As captain, Khan played a total of 48 test matches, 14 of which were won by Pakistan, 8 were lost and the remaining 26 were drawn. He continued to play 139 ODIs with 77 wins, 57 losses, and one draw.
Winning the World Cup
The climax of Khan's career as a captain and cricketer came when he led Pakistan's national team to victory in the ICC Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in 1992. Since his team only had a weak stroke line-up, Khan praised himself as a batsman to give the line-up together with Javed Miandad's stability. Accordingly, his contributions as a bowler to this game were minimal. In the last game, at the age of 39, Khan scored the highest number of runs of all Pakistani batsmen and took the last wicket to win himself. So the Pakistani national cricket team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground win the final against England with 22 runs.
Imran Khan: Controversy
Batsman Allan Lamb and former English captain and legendary all-rounder Ian Botham claimed that Khan described them as "racist, uneducated and classless" in India Today. Khan defended himself and replied that he had been misquoted. He only defended himself after he once admitted to manipulating a ball in a county match 18 years earlier.
In 1994 Khan admitted that during Test Matches he "occasionally roughened the side of the ball and raised the seam". He added, “I've only used an object once. When I played Hampshire with Sussex in 1981, the ball wouldn't cut at all. I had the 12th man bring me a bottle cap and then the ball fluttered a lot ”. Khan won what the judge described as "an exercise in futility" with a majority decision of the jury of 10: 2.
Imran Khan: Charity work
For the first four years after retiring from cricket in 1992, Khan devoted himself almost entirely to social work. In 1991 he founded the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Trust, a foundation that bears the name of his mother, Shaukat Khanum. As his foundation's first project, Khan built Pakistan's first and only cancer clinic. The necessary 25 million US dollars were collected by Khan as donations and funds worldwide. In memory of his mother, who died of cancer, the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Center opened in Lahore on December 29, 1994, as a charitable cancer clinic that provides 75 percent of treatments for free. Khan tries as chairman of the clinic, with the help of celebrities such as Sushmita Sen, Elizabeth Hurley, and many members of the Indian cricket term to raise funds for the operation of the clinic. During the 1990s, Khan served as UNICEF Special Envoy in support of health and vaccination programs in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
Khan is currently working on two other social projects. He is building another cancer clinic in Karachi, using his successful clinic in Lahore as a model. He also supports the establishment of Namal College, a technical college in the Mianwali District, which is being developed in cooperation with the University of Bradford from the United Kingdom. Namal College was funded by the Mianwali Development Trust, of which Khan is the founder, and became a partner institution of Bradford University in 2005 with the signing of the Collaboration Agreement by Imran Khan and the University's Vice-Chancellor Professor Chris Taylor.
When in London, Khan also works for Lord's Taverners, a charity promoting cricket among young people.
Imran Khan: Political career
A few years after ending his career as a cricketer, Khan entered active politics, admitting that he never took part in an election before running for office himself. His political agenda was influenced by Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the former head of Inter-Services Intelligence, known for his support in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and his anti-American stance. Khan founded his own political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in April 1996, which ran with the slogan and vision of "justice, humanity, and self-respect".
In the 1997 election, neither Khan nor other PTI candidates were able to win a mandate. The Pakistani press reported that Khan's campaign was funded by his then-father-in-law, Sir James Goldsmith, with £ 5 million. Khan denied this. In the following parliamentary election in October 2002, the PTI received 0.8 percent of the vote and thus one of 272 seats to be awarded in this election. The only elected MP for the PTI was Khan himself, who represented the Mianwali constituency in the National Assembly moved in. As a deputy, Khan was represented on two committees of the National Assembly: the Standing Committee on Kashmir and the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. His areas of interest in the legislation were foreign policy, education policy, and justice.
In June 2007, the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afghan Khan Niazi and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party independently filed motions against Khan to be expelled from the National Assembly for moral misconduct. Both motions, based on Articles 62 and 63 of the Pakistani Constitution, were rejected on September 5.
On October 2, 2007, Khan resigned from his seat in parliament along with 85 other MPs in protest against the presidential election planned for October 6. The President of Pakistan is elected by the members of the National Assembly, and some members of this House of Parliament, including Khan, believed that General Pervez Musharraf's re-election efforts were against the constitution while Musharraf retained the post of Army Chief. Khan and the PTI, along with other parties, boycotted the elections on February 18, 2008, because they did not consider the elections to be constitutional. By Nawaz Sharif, The PTI was offered five seats in the National Assembly, but Khan declined the offer and instead supported the reinstatement of the recently dismissed constitutional judge.
Ideology
Khan's political platform and statements are based on
- Islamic values, to which he has recognized again since the 1990s,
- Economic freedom, with the promise of a deregulated economy and the creation of a welfare state,
- Reduction of bureaucracy and anti-corruption laws to establish and maintain good governance,
- the establishment of an independent judiciary,
- a reform of the Pakistani police force, and
- an anti-militarist perspective for a democratic Pakistan.
Khan attributes his decision to enter politics to a spiritual revival that began in the last few years of his cricket career through his conversations with a mystic of Sufism. “I never drank or smoked, but I went to parties often enough. There has been no progress in my spiritual development, ”he told the Washington Post. As a member of the National Assembly, he sometimes voted with the bloc of religious hardliners such as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party. In 2002 Khan supported the party chairman of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, against Musharraf's nominee for Prime Minister. Rehman is a cleric who supports the Taliban and called for holy war against the United States.
Khan told the British 2007 Daily Telegraph: "I want that Pakistan is a welfare state and a real democracy with the rule of law and an independent judiciary." after graduation Other ideas published by him are the requirement for students, one year as a teacher to go to the countryside, and the dismantling of overstaffed bureaucracy, with the vacancies also working as teachers. "We need decentralization and more decision-making power at the grassroots." Khan told the BBC in 1998. In June 2007, he publicly disapproved of the accolade of Indian-born author Salman Rushdie. He said: "Western civilization should have paid attention to the injuries that the writer has inflicted on the Muslim community with his controversial book The Satanic Verses ."
Criticism
Khan is dismissed as a political lightweight in the ranks and among political commentators. His critics claim that a large number of visitors to his events are only drawn in by his fame as a cricketer and that the public sees him as an entertainer rather than a serious political figure. The lack of success in achieving broad political influence and building a national movement is attributed by commentators and observers to his naivety and lack of political maturity.
The accusation of hypocrisy and opportunism is repeatedly raised against Khan, especially in view of his loud criticism of President Musharraf after he supported him in his 1999 military coup. In a 2002 column entitled “Will the Real Imran Please Stand Up”, Pakistani columnist Amir Zia quotes a PTI party official from Karachi: “Even we find it difficult to recognize the real Imran. When in Pakistan he wears the Salwar Kamiz and preaches Desi and religious values, but it changes completely when he associates with the elite in Britain or elsewhere in the West. ”
Opposition to Musharraf and Bush
Khan supported General Pervez Musharraf's military coup in 1999 but condemned Musharraf's presidency a few months before the 2002 general election. Many political commentators and his opponents described this change of opinion as opportunistic. “I regret my support for the referendum. I was made to understand that once the general came to power, he would begin cleaning up the corrupt parts in the system. That wasn't the case at all. "Khan explained later. During the 2002 election campaign, he turned against Pakistan's logistical support for the United States' armed forces in their war in Afghanistan. At an election rally in Kamar Mushanihe told the crowd that their country had become a "servant of America". In the later election of the prime minister, he voted in parliament for an Islamist supporting the Taliban and against Musharraf's candidate.
On May 6, 2005, Khan was one of the first Muslim leaders to criticize the alleged desecration of the Qur'an in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention center , following a 300-word article in Newsweek news magazine on April 30. Khan condemned the desecration at a press conference and demanded that General Musharraf seek an apology from American President George W. Bush for the incident. Khan was a vocal critic of the alliance between Pakistan and the United States, particularly in the war on terror. In 2006 he shouted, “Musharraf is sitting there, licking George Bush's shoes!” He has also criticized other leaders from the Muslim world for their support for the Bush administration: “They are puppets who rule over the Muslim world. We want a sovereign Pakistan. We don't want a president who is George Bush's poodle. ” During George Bush's visit to Pakistan in March 2006, Khan was placed under house arrest after threatening to protest against the American president's implicit support for a dictatorship in Pakistan to organize. Khan was picked up in a restaurant in Islamabad and locked in his home.
House arrest
On November 3, 2007, shortly after the state of emergency was declared in Pakistan, Khan was placed under house arrest by the Musharraf government. After the imposition of house arrest, Khan demanded the death penalty for Musharraf, whom he accused of high treason. The following day, November 4th, he managed to escape from his father's home in Lahore and go underground. finally reappeared on November 14th to start student protests at the University of Punjab. At the rally, Khan became a student of the Jamaat-e-Islamicaptured, held at the nearby High Energy Physics Center for about an hour, and then handed over to the police at the university gate. While he was subsequently in police custody, he was charged with an anti-terror law charge for allegedly inciting people to raise arms, inciting civil disobedience, and sowing hatred.
Imran Khan: Private
He was married to Jemima Khan, daughter of British-French billionaire James Goldsmith, between 1995 and 2004. The sons Sulaiman (* 1996) and Qasim (* 1999) result from the marriage. Before that, he was in a relationship with the then MTV presenter Kristiane Backer from 1992 to 1995, a relationship that was kept secret from the public. In January 2015, he married the journalist Reham Khan. In October 2015, he announced that the couple would get divorced. In February 2018 he married Bushra Wattoo, his Sufi teacher, who appears veiled in public.
Imran Khan: Works
- Imran Khan, Patrick Murphy: Imran: The Autobiography of Imran Khan. Pelham Books, London, 1983.
- Imran Khan, Photographs by Mike Goldwater: Indus Journey: A Personal View of Pakistan. Chatto & Windus, London, 1990.
- Imran Khan: All Round View. Mandarin, 1992.
- Imran Khan, photographs by Pervez A. Khan: Warrior Race: A Journey Through the Land of the Tribal Pathans. Chatto & Windus, London, 1993.
