Imran Khan on the cipher, the economy, and refusing to quit

A conversation from a closed room

The episode opens with Muzamil thanking the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, and asking the simplest question first: how are you, how are you feeling? Khan answers that he has been confined to two rooms for roughly three and a half months. It is the season he waits for all year, winter, his best time for the outdoors, and he has spent it shut indoors, practising patience.

He explains the caution. The risk, he says, is that if the bone has not fully healed, not become what he calls compact, a single jolt could re-break it at the same spot on his left leg where he once suffered a stress fracture playing cricket. Back then he returned to the game too early, the bone opened twice, and he ended up in a cast for three months. So he is taking full care now, because he has an election campaign to run and does not want to take any chance on the way. Three and a half months of rest; a few more weeks to be sure the leg is fully right. Muzamil wishes him a speedy recovery and a return to the open, his natural environment, before turning to the news.

The cipher, and the alleged U-turn

Muzamil raises a statement of Khan’s that had gone viral, read by some as Khan saying the foreign government was not involved, and asks whether he had really taken a U-turn.

Khan says he had not, and walks through what he says he actually told Voice of America. The cipher, he says, is real: it was placed before the National Security Council, recorded in cabinet minutes, and presented in parliament. Inside it, he says, the US envoy, whom he names as Donald Lu, conveyed that there would be consequences for Pakistan if Imran Khan were not removed through the vote of no confidence. That, Khan says, was a real threat, and at the time everyone understood the move to have been initiated from America.

What he says he learned later changes only the starting point, not the substance. He alleges that a lobbyist had been hired, under Pakistan’s foreign office and by General Bajwa in his telling, to campaign against him in America, on the framing that Imran Khan was anti-American and the general was pro-American. So in Khan’s telling the sequence runs the other way: the effort was initiated from home, the threat then came back through the cipher, and the no-confidence motion followed. On that account, he argues, he never stepped back from his position at all. He also points to what he says was a recent Bajwa interview in which the general said he believed Khan was bad for Pakistan and that removing him could open the door to an economic rise.

Two snapshots, ten months apart

Asked how he feels about a grade-22 officer effectively deciding whether an elected prime minister stays, Khan calls the decision-making itself the first danger: a single man, with a few colleagues, in a closed room, removing through conspiracy a government the country’s people had elected, a call he stresses the constitution does not authorise these people to make.

The second danger, he says, is economic, and he frames it as two snapshots. In March 2022, he argues, Pakistan’s economic indicators were all positive, with the targets set on exports, growth rate and agriculture being met, and the country was, on his account, at one of its best moments in 17 years, without the American dollars that had flowed in during the war years a generation earlier. He says the IMF’s own summary at the time put Pakistan on a sustainable, inclusive growth path, and points to the health-card programme as something the World Bank and Stanford University singled out as moving Pakistan toward a welfare state. Ten months on, he says, the country stands at the edge of economic collapse, with a foreign newspaper article raising the spectre of a Sri Lanka type situation. He says he predicted this, to Bajwa directly and publicly in a June interview, warning that the country would be bankrupted and national security eventually compromised.

Inflation, NAB, and the leaked calls

Khan ties the collapse to specific choices. He says inflation is the highest in 50 years and still climbing, and asks who is responsible. He points to the repeal of NAB accountability laws and the waiving of what he puts at 1,100 billion rupees in corruption cases as the mechanism, arguing the same people who benefitted were unmoved that the country was sliding toward bankruptcy. He describes arrests and treatment of figures including Azam Swati and Sheikh Rasheed as violations of fundamental rights and dignity that, he says, Pakistan had not seen before.

Then he turns to the recordings. Muzamil notes that audio of Khan and Shehbaz Sharif keeps leaking and asks for his comment on a state where the prime minister’s calls are taped. Khan calls it a total violation of the constitution and an actual crime. He says his private line as prime minister was tapped, citing conversations with his principal secretary Azam Khan and a recording involving Bushra Begum, and that one release was doctored, edited to look more sensational. The agencies whose job is to protect the country from threats, he argues, were instead building tapes to blackmail a sitting prime minister, and he asks why: he is no foreign agent, no thief who sent money abroad; he says he brought his foreign earnings home and has nothing offshore. The purpose, he concludes, was control through blackmail rather than national interest. He recounts a meeting in which, he says, he was told these were only the first step, that files existed on others, and that he too had been a “playboy,” to which he replied that they had something on him, then, and that this is a country cutting into its own stomach to spend on security forces that now turn inward.

”The army needs to look inward”

Muzamil presses on what it reflects when the institution with the most power is, by Khan’s account, making blackmail tapes. Khan says the Pakistan army needs introspection now, because the distance between the public and the army is widening, and that beating people, filing treason cases, jailing and stripping and torturing them is the wrong answer. He has said it before and repeats it: Pakistan is heading toward a point where the situation slips out of everyone’s hands, including the organised institution that assumes it can always regain control. When economic collapse comes, he warns, even a superpower can break. The Soviet Union did.

Asked whether, back in power, he would put his foot down or fall back into the same pattern of waiting it out, Khan says people accuse him of only wanting the establishment on his side rather than wanting it constrained, and answers by laying out what he would actually do.

The one reform: rule of law

The biggest step, Khan says, is rule of law. He frames it from experience, cricket, travel and a politics degree at university, into a single claim: the largest difference between rich and poor countries is that rich countries have justice and rule of law, while poor countries run on the law of the jungle, where might is right. He cites the 60-plus FIRs filed against him as an example of law turned into a weapon.

He argues the economy is inseparable from this. It is political economy, not an isolated machine you fix by importing a genius to write a policy. Growth depends on a governance structure that gives domestic and foreign capital the confidence to invest, and that requires contract enforcement. A Pakistani abroad who wants to invest at home buys property or plots and finds them seized by “qabza” groups, he says, because there is no rule of law, something that does not happen in America, England or Europe. So the first reform is rule of law, and for that every institution has to play its part.

On accountability, Khan invokes Singapore: corruption was controlled there by catching the big fish, not the small ones. He says NAB recovered 480 billion rupees in his government’s time, roughly 160 billion a year flowing into the treasury, and contrasts that with far smaller recoveries he attributes to the current accountability body after the law was changed. He says NAB was not under his control and that he did not influence it; what stopped fuller recovery, he argues, was the general under whom it sat, who protected the very families, naming old Sharif and Zardari cases running into tens of billions of rupees, and then, he says, saved them and made one of them prime minister. He invokes a hadith he says he repeats often: a community that does not hold its powerful criminals to account, only its weak ones, destroys itself. Big theft, money laundering, sending billions abroad, only the powerful can do; protecting them is what truly breaks a country.

Elections, by-elections, and the fear of a flood

Muzamil pushes on the practical: last time you said all the right things, came to power, and found the system would not let you do them. How do you fix the system itself? Khan returns to rule of law and equality before the law, then to the immediate fight: getting elections held. He says the Election Commission and governors are not responding, that handlers behind the scenes are stalling, and that delaying past the constitutional 90-day window would leave no difference between Pakistan and a banana republic, especially if the judiciary is rendered unable to protect anyone.

He argues the establishment delays elections because it fears the campaign will reveal how the wind has turned. He points to by-election results, 29 of 36 seats won, he says, despite the Election Commission and establishment lining up against PTI, as the reason they are frightened of a general election they cannot control. But delay, he warns, solves nothing: no foreign country trusts Pakistan enough to lend, no domestic or foreign capital will invest, and the default risk that he says was around 5 percent when he left has gone to 100 percent. The whole exercise, he argues, is to keep delaying in the hope of removing Imran Khan from the equation first, and it is, he says, the road to the country’s ruin, because there is no hope left in the direction it is heading.

Despondency, and the people who hoped

Muzamil narrows the conversation to Khan’s own supporters, many of whom, he says, have slid from hope into despondency. He cites roughly 800,000 people leaving Pakistan, friends among them who say there is no point and no future, and a poll on his own social media where a large share said they would not vote at all. What do you say, he asks, to the supporter who has given up?

Khan first corrects a framing: he does not say the judiciary is bad; he says it is under pressure no judiciary should face, from the establishment on one side and from what he calls a mafia of thieves on the other. The real despair, he argues, is newer than cynicism about politicians: it is the realisation that the establishment, long assumed to act in Pakistan’s interest, stood with the thieves. When the general says he removed Imran Khan to save the country, Khan argues, the next question should be why he then installed those he is removing. People feel the system is “red,” a fixed match, and conclude nothing they do will matter. But Khan reads it the opposite way: once elections are announced, he predicts that anger converts at the polling booth, and that the very people blocking elections are afraid of exactly that flood.

He says he will not deal with the Sharif and Zardari families, the country’s biggest looters in his words, whom he has opposed across 26 years of campaigning, but is always willing to talk to politicians. His reform, he says, would require anyone holding high office to disclose and hold their wealth inside Pakistan, distinguishing the Pakistani who earned money abroad honestly from the one who sends stolen or tax-dodged money out. He contrasts his own record, no private foreign trips as PM by his account, with what he describes as repeated private visits by his predecessors to places where they hold property.

Tickets, loyalty, and the closing question

On the coming Punjab elections, Khan says he will distribute tickets himself, because last time tickets were effectively bought, and tells candidates listening that anyone asking them for money has no authority, since tickets come at the end, from him, after consultations. His two criteria are loyalty to the party and its ideology, and integrity. He acknowledges shades of grey, but says the moment is too serious for the old “electables” who switch sides only to protect their own constituency.

Muzamil closes with a personal question: after exposing the system, how does Khan feel about the possibility of not succeeding, and about all the people who pinned their hopes on him, his own late father among them? Khan answers in the language of faith and of sport. Communities, like people, have their ups and downs; the Quran, he says, tells of Pharaoh and Moses, of systems of cruelty that do not last, and says God does not change a people’s condition until they try to change it themselves. Standing aside is not allowed when it is a fight between truth and falsehood. And from cricket, he says, he always walked in believing he would win, and a winner looks for opportunities, not for what happens if he loses. He says he has never doubted that Pakistan will one day become a riyasat, and that they will build it through struggle.

Muzamil thanks viewers and points them to the show’s channels for feedback.