Rafia Zakaria
In September, Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, who has been in prison for more than two years, wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, describing his incarceration in a 9-by-11 foot “cage.”
“I have endured continued solitary confinement,” Khan wrote. “All access to books and newspapers has been denied to me.” He is 72 years old and has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. His letter can be seen as a plea for mercy, an exhortation to justice, and even as suggestive of his fading hopes of legal reprieve.
Millions of Khan’s supporters and members of his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), believe the charges against him are fabricated and politically motivated. Technically, Khan’s imprisonment is the consequence of an entangled mess of numerous legal cases. He has been convicted in some and he continues to be on trial in several others. Recently, a court in the city of Lahore dismissed his petition to merge the cases against him.
After a decade and a half of making little headway in politics, Khan aligned himself and his PTI with the military in the early 2010s, and eventually rose to power as prime minister in 2018. After some years of power-sharing, Khan fell out of favor with the military establishment and was ousted from office after a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022.
Khan blamed the army and the United States for engineering his ouster, and led energetic protests demanding immediate, fresh elections. After he was briefly arrested in May 2023, his followers attacked Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi and the home of a senior military official in Lahore. Khan stands accused of instigating those attacks.
A crackdown on his party followed. Most of the PTI leaders have been either arrested or forced to resign. Hundreds of party workers have been imprisoned. Amnesty International has recorded cases of family members of PTI leaders being “forcibly disappeared.” In July, more than a hundred members of the party were arrested. Khan’s party has lost its street power and ability to protest as most of its leaders are either in prison or have found safety in leaving the party.
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