114 VANITY FAIR OCTOBER 2019
in August 2014, there was a crackdown
against the protesters. “In front of my
eyes,” Virk told me via Skype, “the govern-
ment was firing tear-gas shells and rubber
bullets.” Most of the protesters managed
to flee. “But Imran Khan, who was merely
a cricketer, was still standing there,” Virk
recalled. “I thought, if under these terrible
conditions, he can remain here, then it
really means something.” Finding himself
“radicalized” by the crackdown, and by
Khan’s display of personal courage, Virk
became a yuthiya—one of the rabid Khan
supporters, active on social media, who
are roughly comparable to Trump’s army
of internet trolls.
Whatever else can be said about Khan,
he inspires hope the likes of which Pakistan
has not known for a long time. Attiya Noon,
an interior designer, was seven months
pregnant when she went to see Khan
speak at the Minar-e-Pakistan monument
in 2011—widely regarded as the moment
when Khan became a credible political
choice. “Up until that point,” Noon said,
“we had no hope in the system. We all felt
that this guy means well, but he’s not going
to get anywhere.” Noon recalls the rally as
electrifying, with its songs and slogans and
the yuthiyas with their faces painted in PTI
greens and reds. In a country where politics
had for so long been the preserve of a feudal
class and the rural poor, this was a new kind
of politics, with a new constituency located
within a nascent urban middle class. “It
was such a festive atmosphere,” Noon said.
“There were people from all walks of life—
society aunties, groups of boys and girls
together. People were pressed on people, but
there was no pushing, no shoving. Everyone
was really respectful.” The event confirmed
Noon as something of a Khan political
groupie; ever since, she has followed him
from rally to rally.
The zealous support of followers like
Noon is both a source of Khan’s power
and a comfort to the military. “From the
generals’ point of view, things could not
be better,” observed Haqqani, the former
ambassador. “They have an ostensibly
civilian government in place, which can get
the blame for Pakistan’s myriad problems,
while the generals run the government.”
Khan has called out the army on its support
of terrorist groups and was nothing short of
statesmanlike earlier this year in calming
tensions between India and Pakistan. In
late July, Khan scored another coup during
a White House meeting with Trump. The
dynamic between the two philandering
narcissists was positively electric. Trump
called Khan a “great leader”—his highest
praise—and offered to serve as a mediator
over the contested state of Kashmir. The
remark set off a furor in India, which has
since stripped Kashmir of its autonomy
and flooded the region with troops, further
escalating tensions.
The greatest challenge of Khan’s tenure,
however, is whether he can find a way to get
his debt-ridden country out of the doldrums
of economic despair. As his government
gets ready to accept a $6 billion bailout from
the I.M.F.—an organization to which, with
characteristic imperiousness, Khan had
refused to go “begging”—the only subject
on anybody’s lips is the massive inflation on
daily goods such as petrol, sugar, and butter
that has accompanied a rupee in free fall. As
I was leaving Islamabad, Khan was getting
ready to sack his finance minister, part of a
sweeping cabinet reshuffle.In an age of majoritarian grievance, Khan
has joined the pantheon of populist leaders
around the world whom people look to as
saviors. “These leaders,” Mohsin Hamid
told me, “are the versions of ourselves we
would like to believe in.” When I asked him
about Khan’s future, the writer made what
felt like a prescient remark. “The pattern we
see again and again,” Hamid said, “is the
rise of the charismatic leader who thinks he
knows best—even better than the military—
and then is undone by the military.”
In 1981, Naipaul wrote of Pakistan, “The
state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only
led back to the faith.” Now, almost 40 years
later, Imran Khan is once again making
the case for a society founded on the prin-
ciples of the Koran. But religion, far from
being the solution to Pakistan’s problems,
appears to be an impediment to a society
struggling to make its peace with modern
realities. The country that banned porno-
graphy in the name of faith also happens
to be among its most voracious consum-
ers; gay dating apps like Grindr flourish,
but homosexuality is on paper punishable
by death; Pakistan is dry, but behind closed
doors its elite consume great quantities of
alcohol and cocaine. In such a place, it is but
a short step from distorted individual reali-
ties to a distorted collective one. To visit
Pakistan is to inhabit an alternate reality;
the great majority of people I spoke with,
from Lahore drawing rooms to the street,
believe that 9/11 was an American con-
spiracy. Imran Khan, with his experience
of the world beyond, does not clarify reality
in Pakistan, but rather adds to the fog with
Jekyll and Hyde confusions of his own.
I asked Zafar, the pop star, about his
friend’s internal contradictions. “I think
the effort to understand and balance the
East and West is a colossal challenge,” he
said. The night before, Zafar had led me
by the hand to a Buddha tree in his garden,
from which a Chinese wind chime hung.He struck the chime and asked me to listen
to its reverberations. He wanted me, I sup-
pose, to see that the key to understanding
Khan lies in the spiritual journey he had
undertaken—that it is in faith that the many
people Khan had carried within him all his
life would be subsumed.
In an important passage in his auto-
biography, Khan, in explaining his failure
to adhere to the religion his mother want-
ed him to follow, writes that she “had no
way of really comprehending the impact
of the competing cultural forces in my
life.” Like so many people who have lived
across diverse cultures, Khan seems to
have found no internal resolution to these
competing forces. Instead, he decided to
kill off the man he had been in the West.
As someone who was once close to him
told me, Khan has cut off all contact with
members of the “old guard” after this “lat-
est, very weird marriage.”
Submission—which is, of course, the lit-
eral meaning of “Islam”—is the word that
Zafar uses to describe Bushra Maneka’s
appeal for Khan. We were sitting in the pop
star’s man cave, full of trophies and framed
magazine covers. A sign on the wall read,
“Old cowboys never die, they just smell that
way.” Zafar brought up the one Khan trait
that even his worst enemies don’t begrudge
him: He never gives up. He recalled visit-
ing Khan in the hospital in 2013, after his
friend had fallen 20 feet during an election
rally and injured his back. A TV in the room
was broadcasting a cricket match, which
Pakistan was losing badly. Bedridden, Khan
flicked a cricket ball from hand to hand, as
if reliving the anxiety of captaining the
team. “We can win,” the man still known
in Pakistan as kaptaan kept insisting, right
up until the match’s final moment. “We can
still win.” Khan exuded power and resolve;
but, as Zafar said, even the most powerful
men have a vulnerable side, “a child inside
you, who is wanting to be nurtured and be
taken care of.” That was what Maneka pro-
vided Khan, in the midst of his campaign to
become prime minister.
“Imagine 22 years of struggle,” Zafar said,
“and you’ve got this election coming. And if
it’s not this, then you don’t know....” His voice
trailed off. “I think she gave him that surety,
which he needed, and also that warmth. I
think he submitted himself to her.”
The last time the two men saw each other
was at a fund-raiser. Onstage, Khan asked
Zafar what he was doing with his life these
days. “I’m studying Rumi,” the pop star
said. “I’m digging deeper into the spiritual
aspect of things. I’m swimming in that sea.”
“Let me tell you something,” replied the
future prime minister of Pakistan, the man
whom destiny had appointed once again
to captain his country. “This—what you’re
looking for—is the only thing there is.”Imran Khan