The man that Pakistan can jail but not erase |
Islamabad may have succeeded in removing Imran Khan the man from the public eye. Erasing Khan the living symbol of national pride has proved far more difficult.
Even in physical confinement, Pakistan’s most famous cricketer turned politician remains omnipresent. Since his arrest in 2023, the former Pakistani prime minister has been held in a high-security jail outside Rawalpindi. Courts have convicted him multiple times on corruption and other charges, producing sentences that combined together stretch for decades. Over almost three years of confinement, the most recognizable person in a country of more than 250 million people has been seen publicly only in a few leaked screenshots from a single video hearing.