The Age of Kali (44 page)

We crossed the checkpoint in to the tribal areas, and our Mercedes was joined by an escort of two jeeps filled with armed men and a swarm of motorcycle outriders. We drove for half an hour through the no man’s land of the tribal reserve until we came to Mohammed ud-Din’s palace. Thirty-foot-high walls reared out of the scrub, studded double gates opened before us, and we were presented with a view of a pleasure complex that could have been a James Bond set. Spotlit fountains rained down water in glistening waterfalls. A white neo-classical porte-cochère gave on to a Georgian mansion; it was whitewashed but otherwise looked as if it had been magically transported from Oxfordshire. On one side was a miniature marble mosque, on the other, partially lit by eddies of reflected light, the ha-ha of a deer park, filled with gazelles and peacocks. Round everything was wrapped the great crenellated walls, loaded with climbing roses, honeysuckle and jasmine.

Inside, two hundred of Mohammed ud-Din’s cousins, retainers and tribesmen were waiting. Huge baroque mirrors reflected glistening chandeliers; stags’ heads studded the walls between fans of nineteenth-century muskets and flintlocks; guards armed with Kalashnikovs flanked the doorways. Imran led the way, and after drinks had been served, we filed past the tribesmen in to the dining room. There, a forest of kebabs, skewered lambs and charcoal-roasted
pullets had been laid on long trestles, amid great tent-flaps of
naan
.

Pathans are good eaters, but less talented conversationalists. After supper was finished we returned to the sitting room to grunt and burp and meditate. Dialogue was intermittent. Soon however the conversation turned to armaments, a subject dear to the heart of every Pathan.

‘What defences do you have here?’ asked Imran.

Mohammed ud-Din considered.

‘Well,’ he said, adding up slowly, ‘I have about fifty gunmen, ten anti-aircraft guns, and … ooh … about four hundred batteries of missiles. They’re only small missiles – you know, four kilometres range.’

Imran looked nonplussed. ‘A show of strength is very important in the tribal areas,’ he explained to me in a matter-of-fact tone.

‘I’m one of the largest landowners in my tribe,’ added Mohammed, ‘so it’s my duty to support my poorer relatives. Most of my guards I employ for this reason.’

‘It surely can’t be healthy having this amount of weapons in private hands,’ I said lamely.

‘You Westerners are always telling us this,’ he replied. ‘But for poor people the tribal system is very good. In the settled areas in Pakistan there is much violence. But here no one can rape any girl. No one can steal. They know the tribe will rally round and there will be a blood feud if they do. In Pakistan you can kill a man in broad daylight and if you have the money you can buy justice. But with tribal law rich men and poor men are equal. You cannot buy the tribal council – you pay with your neck.’

Several large joints passed around the room before someone suggested it was time to go outside and play with the Kalashnikovs. We piled out on to the porte-cochère, and Imran was handed a rifle and a magazine of tracer. He pointed the gun in the air and fired off the whole clip. Scarlet shooting stars streaked up in a glowing arc and fell outside the walls, beyond the deer park.

‘At my friend’s wedding, I alone fired eight hundred rounds,’
said someone behind me. Other tribesmen were muttering in Pushtu, out of which emerged, as solitary comprehensible islands, the names of weapons: ‘Rumble, rumble, rumble, anti-tank gun. Rumble, rumble, Stinger! Stinger rumble? Kalashnikov rumble, SCUD rumble, T-72 rumble. RPG. Acha.’

On the way back in the Mercedes, Imran was in high spirits.

‘What did you think?’ he asked.

‘Terrifying.’

‘Yes,’ he said, proudly. ‘These are my people.’

Two years later, Imran retired from cricket but remained in the news: first by raising funds to build a cancer hospital in Lahore following his mother’s death from the disease; then by announcing he had ‘reawakened’ to his Muslim faith; then by marrying Jemima, daughter of the Europhobic tycoon Sir James Goldsmith. Following Jemima’s conversion to Islam a ludicrous – and sadly characteristic – wave of anti-Islamic hysteria swept the British press. The
Sun,
anxious that the glamorous Jemima would not be able to wear figure-hugging clothes in Lahore, filled its front page with the query ‘HOW KHAN JEMIMA COPE WITH ALLAH THIS?’ Andrew Neil in the
Sunday Times
described Jemima as ‘sleepwalking into slavery’, while the
Evening Standard
’s front page showed her leaving San Lorenzo ‘after throwing off the shackles of her Muslim religion to enjoy a traditional hen night with her friends’
.

The following year Imran founded his own political party, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf, or Justice Movement. Following the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s venal government on 5 November 1996, he mobilised his new party to fight the election, amid high hopes that he would change the face of Pakistani politics by riding the wave of public disgust with corrupt politicians. Shortly afterwards I returned to Pakistan to cover his election campaign. It quickly became clear that, despite the enthusiasm of both the crowds
and the British media (who sometimes made it seem as if the election was already in Imran’s pocket), it was by no means going to be an easy ride for the former cricketer
.

LAHORE
,
1996

‘I will vote for Imran Khan,’ said the man on the motorbike, ‘because he is a very good cricketer and because he has very nice inner beauty.’

Imran’s convoy had been ambushed by cheering fans as it drew to a halt at the toll gate on the Lahore-Islamabad highway. Amid a pall of smoke, an arsenal of Chinese firecrackers exploded by the side of the road, while nearby a Punjabi wedding band in mock-regimental finery struck up ‘For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. From every side a thousand overexcited supporters closed in on the candidate, bawling out the chant
‘Imran zindabad!’
(Long live Imran!)
‘Imran Khan Vizier-e-Azam!’
(Prime Minister Imran Khan!)

After baskets of rose petals had been showered and speeches made, the convoy began to move off again, now led by a squad of fifty boys on Vespa scooters, all flying the red and green flag of Imran’s new party, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf. Bringing up the rear was Imran’s battered Mercedes, which following the floral welcoming ceremony looked as if it had crashed in to a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show, its bonnet thickly carpeted with rose petals while several strings of marigold garlands dangled from its wing mirrors.

The Mercedes looked nearly old enough to have been a Nazi staff car, but it was painted bright yellow and plastered with lurid posters of the aspiring politician. They all carried a photograph of Imran which must have been shot in the late 1970s, when he had sported a bouffant hairdo that made him look more like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
than the cropped, chiselled, more austere figure he cuts today.

Inside the car, Imran looked profoundly tired and slightly haggard. He had been on the road, holding three or four rallies a day for two weeks now, and every day the campaigning had been followed by late nights in an endless chain of committee meetings. These days, he said, he considered himself lucky to catch even four hours’ sleep a night. This latest rally had been organised only two days before, and as it was being held on the land of a feudal landowner hostile to Imran everyone had been worried that nobody would turn up. Certainly no one had expected a reception like this.

As we approached the venue, a one-horse
mofussil
nowhere-town called Lala Mousa, the crowds lining the pavements and hard shoulders began to spill out on to the motorway itself, reducing our speed to a crawl. Over the motorway signs, banners had been hung: ‘Victory to Imran Khan!’ ‘Imran Khan the Conqueror!’ Every roof was lined with cheering fans and supporters; out of every window fluttered Justice Movement flags.

‘You’re seeing the beginning of a revolution,’ Imran shouted to me, struggling to be heard above the noise. ‘When our supporters started work six months ago people dismissed them as lunatics; they said we had no chance. Now those same people are queuing up to join us. The people are sick of the old politicians. Just look around you: something very, very big is brewing up.’

As our pace slowed, in our wake there built up a tailback of some two hundred vehicles. Immediately behind us was a brightly painted coach (or rather, as the inscription on its side put it, a MERCEDES RAJAH SUPER AIRBUS) whose passengers, caught up in the excitement, had begun to dance on the roof, and who only narrowly avoided being decapitated when the bus passed underneath a low-slung power cable. All the while Imran waved regally from the open window, shaking some of the outstretched hands thrust towards him, while his driver endeavoured somehow to plough slowly through the milling multitudes without killing anyone. When he finally pushed through to the base of the platform,
Imran leapt out and sprang up to the dais. His baggy khaki
salwar kameez
billowing in the breeze, he began to thunder out his pitch:

‘For fifty years the politicians have been exploiting the people of Pakistan,’ he declaimed, punching the air like a demagogue. ‘They’ve been looting and plundering the country! The thief protects the thief! We want to bring the plunderers to justice! We will hang the corrupt! The people of Pakistan should unite to achieve their cause!’

At the side of the platform, the District Superintendent of Police and the local magistrate gazed down at the ecstatic crowds which now stretched for at least two miles down the road, totally blocking both lanes of Pakistan’s principal motorway.

‘I have been here for ten years,’ said the DSP, ‘and I’ve never seen anything like this. In fact I’ve never seen a crowd even one tenth this size. How many are here? Thirty thousand? Thirty-five thousand? Benazir’s people had to throw money around to get even two thousand when she came here.’

The District Magistrate, a portly, moustachioed gent in a tweed jacket, nodded his head in agreement. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘this is something quite new.’

Imran Khan might have been pulling in record crowds out in the provinces, but in the political lobbies of Islamabad and the establishment drawing rooms of Lahore, it was extremely difficult to find anyone who really rated his chances at the election.

In many ways this was hardly surprising. Imran had launched his Tehrik-e-Insaaf only six months earlier. At the time he believed he would have two years to prepare the new party for a general election, to form a set of coherent policies, set up offices across
Pakistan and find clean, capable candidates to run them. In the event, less than a month after he had formally announced that he was entering politics, Benazir Bhutto’s government was prematurely dissolved for gross corruption by the President, Farooq Leghari. Suddenly Imran found he had only three months in which to mobilise his embryonic political movement.

The result was that, for all his undoubted popularity, few commentators in Pakistan took his challenge seriously. As the election drew near, they began to point out that he still had no credible grassroots organisation, no big-name candidates and no clear policies. Moreover, his enemies questioned whether he had the intellectual capacity to form them.