Even after a year in jail, Imran Khan still dominates Pakistan's politics

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has now been behind bars for a year – although there are times you would barely know it.

Khan is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics; his name still in the papers and the courts. His social media supporters have been unrelenting.

With no public appearances, the few people allowed in to see the former cricket star regularly – his lawyers and family – have become his conduit for messages to the outside world. They are keen to push the message that his 365 days behind bars have left him unbowed.

“There is still a swagger about him,” Aleema Khanum, Imran Khan’s sister, says. “He’s got no needs, no wants — only a cause.”

According to those who visit him, Khan spends his days on his exercise bike, reading and reflecting. He has an hour a day to walk around the courtyard. There have been occasional disagreements about how quickly the family can provide him with new books.

“He has said ‘I’m not wasting a minute of my time in jail, it’s an opportunity for me to get more knowledge’,” Ms Khanum tells the BBC.

But the fact is Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi are still trapped in prison, with no sign they will be released any time soon.

According to some, this is not a surprise.

“There was no expectation that Khan was going to do anything that would make it easy for him to get out of jail,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington.

And the military — Pakistan’s powerful behind-the-scenes player — “don’t ease up when they decide there’s a political figure that they want to lock up”, says Kugelman. “That has especially been the case with Khan.”

Indeed, the military has been key to many of the ups and downs of Khan’s life in the last decade. Many analysts believe it was his initial close relationship with the military establishment which helped him win power.

But by 9 May last year, that was in tatters. Khan — who had been ousted from power in a vote of no confidence in 2022 — had been arrested, and his supporters came out to protest.

Some of those protests turned violent, and there were attacks on military buildings — including the official residence of the most senior army official in Lahore which was looted and set alight.

In the aftermath, BBC sources said Pakistan’s media companies had been told to stop showing his picture, saying his name or playing his voice.

Khan was released — but ultimately only for a few months.

He was jailed again on 5 August for failing to correctly declare the sale of state gifts — and that was just the start.

In the run-up to the election, the cases against him mounted; by the start of February — just days before the vote — the 71-year-old had acquired three long prison sentences, the last for 14 years.

By the election, many of the candidates standing for Khan's PTI party were also in prison or in hiding, the party stripped of its well-recognized symbol of a cricket bat — a vital identifier in a country with a 58% literacy rate.

Despite this, “we were determined and wanted to make a statement”, Salman Akram Raja, Khan’s lawyer and a candidate in the election, says.

“It was very constrained, many couldn’t campaign at all. The loss of the cricket bat symbol was the body blow.”

All candidates stood as independents, but hopes — even within the party — weren’t high.

Yet candidates backed by Imran Khan won more seats than anyone else, forcing his political rivals to form an alliance to block them. The PTI, meanwhile, was left to fight for many of their seats in court, alleging the results were rigged.

Supporters see the election on 8 February as a turning point, proof of Khan’s potent message — even from behind bars.

“There is a change, that was expressed on 8 February,” says Aleema Khanum. “Change is coming, it is in the air.”

Others say that practically, the result hasn’t changed the status quo.

“We are really where we might expect to be given past precedent,” Kugelman says.

“PTI didn’t form a government, its leader is still in jail and the coalition in power is led by parties backed by the military.”

But more recently, things have certainly seemed to be looking up for Khan and his supporters.

All three of the sentences handed down just before the election have fallen away, a United Nations panel declared his detention was arbitrary and Pakistan’s supreme court said PTI was an official party and should receive "reserve seats"; the seats reserved for women and non-Muslims allocated according to the proportion of seats the party has won.

But none have yet had a practical impact: Khan is still in jail with new cases against his name, and the reserve seats have yet to be allocated.

His wife Bushra Bibi, whose prison sentence was dropped when the case that declared their marriage illegal was appealed, is also still in prison on new charges.

Meanwhile, the government has made it clear that it sees Khan and his party as a public threat. It announced earlier this month that it intends to seek to ban PTI, despite warnings from groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The military also shows no indication it has changed its mind. On the 9 May anniversary this year, a statement from its public relations wing said there would be no compromise with the “planners, facilitators and executioners” and nor would they be allowed to “hoodwink the law of the land”.

And it is this relationship with the military that most analysts think Khan really needs to smooth out to finally escape prison.

“I think we can come up with an arrangement that gives everyone a way out and allows the system to function,” says Khan’s lawyer, Raja.

Meanwhile, from jail, Khan has been delivering his own messages. Aleema Khanum recently said that that he had told the military to "stay neutral... to let this country run" and called it "the backbone of Pakistan".

It has been seen as an olive branch by some commentators, although the use of the term neutral was picked up on; when the army previously declared itself neutral by not taking sides in politics, he ridiculed the expression, saying "only an animal is neutral".

His recent call for snap elections is a move that some see as one of his conditions to the military.

“I don’t think that’s very realistic,” says Kugelman. “Over time, Khan may relent a bit. It is one of the truisms of Pakistani politics: if you want to be prime minister you need to be in the good graces, or at least not the bad graces, of the military.”

For now at least, the stalemate continues. — BBC