It’s one thing to remove a PM from office, as happened to the former cricketer in 2022. But it’s another thing to try to eradicate the most famous person in Pakistan’s history
Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact. There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan. Every turn in a multifarious public life has abounded in fame, first as a cricket legend, then as a beloved philanthropist who built a cancer hospital for the poor, latterly as a maverick politician who swept to power promising reform, and now, as the sole occupant of a cell in Pakistan’s most notorious jail. So famous he’s been the subject of two death hoaxes – most recently in November, when he went unseen for so long that many concluded he had died.
There have been others with greater accomplishments. There may come others in the future. But in almost 79 years of Pakistan, in the pure currency of fame, of being known and recognised, of being talked about, of being the one Pakistani everyone can name, there is nobody beyond Imran. (He is almost universally known by his first name alone.) It holds even now, two years into the state’s attempts to erase him from public life. In that time, they’ve barred TV channels from saying his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture; they’ve even scrubbed him from the footage of his greatest sporting triumph.
In cricket-obsessed countries, it’s often said the PM’s job is second in difficulty only to the national team’s captaincy. Imran is the only person who can tell us for sure. He publicly arrived 50 years ago, delivering Pakistan a famous first cricket win in Australia. He did it in the sexiest, most masculine way the sport offers, by bowling very fast. He went on to become, unarguably, the greatest cricketer Pakistan has produced, leading them to their headiest triumphs. But his premiership was neither as successful nor as long-lasting as his captaincy, ending as every tenure preceding it has, incomplete – and often with its occupants under arrest or in jail.
That is where he has been since August 2023, the result of a political fracture with the ruling authorities: a domineering military establishment with an emaciated civilian government in tow. This is a serious business with consequences for more than 250 million people, but it has also played out like a nasty breakup: burn your ex’s photos in the hope of burning them from your heart.
An authoritarian government trying to vanish a popular political leader is hardly an unfamiliar tale. But it is a tall order in a digital age – and taller still when that leader happens to be the country’s most famous person, with a fame that long predates their political career.
He’s the subject, or author, of at least 10 English-language books. At his sporting peak, his face sold magazines; when he swanned about London’s social scene, he was a tabloid staple. By a rough estimate, he was on nearly a fifth of Pakistani cricket monthly covers in the 1980s. He was editor-in-chief of one of his own, Cricket Life International, in which his editorials became the first blinks of a political awakening. He has fronted advertising campaigns for some of the biggest brands in Pakistan – and even India, unthinkable for a Pakistani. It goes without saying that he has been commemorated in songs.
A former BBC journalist in Pakistan told me they came across 90 hours of audio and video footage in the archives while doing research for a feature when Imran became prime minister in 2018. That is, if you sat down on Monday morning and watched it all without stopping, you would only finish by the early hours of Friday. And that’s just the BBC archives.
No Pakistani has straddled as many spheres, or for as long. Imran was the country’s biggest cricket star when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. When the Berlin Wall fell, he was wearing tuxes and surrounded by women – like a Pakistani James Bond, without the spying and killing. By 9/11 he was a politician. When Covid hit, he was prime minister. Let the biographical wingspan of this fame sink in, already bulging in our analogue world, and now splayed all over our digital one.
As a result, over 50 years he has become ubiquitous, but also, in a way, omnipresent. Not only has Imran been a tangible presence – held in our hands, framed on our walls, boxed in on our TVs and scrolled down our devices – he has also been an incorporeal one, in our idolisation and aspiration, in our lust and disgust, our adoration and our grudges, in our prayers and curses.
So no, he can’t simply be wiped away. And yet, last November, he vanished so completely that it was reasonable to wonder if he had died, until one of his sisters was finally allowed to see him.
If it felt like a foretaste, it is because Pakistan has barely finished dealing with the aftertaste of the unnatural deaths of four of Imran’s predecessors. Aside from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by the generals who overthrew him, the deaths of Liaquat Ali Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto remain unsolved and unresolved. The most popular theories suspect military involvement. With that kind of history, this kind of ending can feel inevitable.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, there has been one single sighting of the most seen and visible man in Pakistan’s history. Imran is pulling a hard expression in the screenshot, which was leaked from a video hearing in jail and instantly went viral, rattling authorities so much that it led to a swift inquiry and swifter suspensions, giving a light trace of the contours of this battle, as well as a sense of its scale: that trying to erase Imran might feel like trying to erase the sky.
On 9 May 2023, a year after he was removed as prime minister, Imran was arrested on corruption charges. He would be released on bail within days, but not before the arrest sparked rioting across the country, with anger directed squarely at the army. A few days later, stunned and stung by the reaction, senior military officials summoned owners of major media organisations, publishers, news directors and anchors to a meeting in Islamabad.
When I met one person who was at that meeting, they asked me to turn off my recorder before we talked about it. We were overlooking Islamabad’s Constitution Avenue – a wishful bit of road not far from D-Chowk, the square that has hosted some of Pakistan’s – and Imran’s – biggest protests. “We were told that Imran’s name and images should not be on TV,” the attender said. “Told expressly and expressively.”
A couple of days later, these instructions were reiterated in an official directive issued by Pakistan’s media regulator. Without mentioning Imran or PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party he had founded in 1996), the order barred channels from giving airtime to 9 May’s “hate mongers, rioters, their facilitators and perpetrators”.
The compliance by broadcast media was immediate. Imran had dominated the news in the year since being removed from office – and now he suddenly disappeared. Coverage of rallies agitating against his removal – ordinarily gold dust for 24/7 news channels – ceased. His name was scrubbed clean off the air. News readers, anchors and tickers began referring to him as “Bani PTI” – the PTI leader.
Asad Umar, a minister in Imran’s government who had himself been briefly arrested, was invited on to a current affairs show soon after the official orders went out. He wasn’t sure whether he’d be allowed to talk freely. “I said [to the anchor]: ‘Are you sure you can interview me and air what I say?’” he recalled to me over a Zoom call from his Karachi home. Umar carried on as normal, speaking about Imran, “and in the first break, [the anchor] said: ‘Bro, you’ll get me killed, you’ve said Imran’s name 17 times!’”
One well-known anchor on ARY News used Imran’s name and then immediately checked himself and said: “I apologise … the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf.” The same channel blurred Imran out of a photo from a meeting he had with IMF officials. The most absurd contortion came from Imran’s former employers, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). When they released a video celebrating Pakistan’s greatest cricket triumphs, including footage of the side that Imran captained to victory in the 1992 World Cup, Imran had been cut out entirely – on instruction from the PCB chair (a political appointee). Zaka Ashraf was not acting on directives from above, though, according to a PCB official I spoke with. He just read the room and thought it the expedient thing to do. After intense blowback, the board were forced to release an updated version with Imran fleetingly restored. “Due to its length,” they explained, “the video was abridged and some important clips were missing.”
Newspapers and other print publications did not fold quite as homogenously, in part because of the dwindling relevance of print media in Pakistan. But the instructions were clear: no photographs of Imran, no headlines with his name. “I returned to a very different landscape,” one newspaper editor, who had gone on holiday before Imran’s arrest, told me. “Reality had changed, within two weeks.”
Urdu newspapers, with bigger circulations, took implementation more strictly – “to a degree it is instruction, after which it is equal parts fear and equal parts being more loyal than the king,” as the editor put it. Punchier publications got away with tiny rebellions, such as a front-page photo of a protester holding a poster of Imran. The blows to press freedom were one thing, but there were more prosaic editorial niggles, too: how many different ways can you headline a story about Imran without using his name?
Especially as, once he was rearrested in August 2023, his trials became an active story. ….
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/24/prisoner-number-804-pakistan-plot-to-erase-imran-khan
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