Imran Khan on Pakistan's political crisis, foreign policy, and the road ahead

Sports as preparation for political life

The episode opens with Muzamil inviting Imran Khan to reflect on something rarely asked in conventional interviews: what the decades he spent in professional cricket actually taught him about the political struggle that followed. Imran Khan’s answer is immediate and personal. Life, he says, never moves in a straight line. No one in history has gone from zero to success without setbacks. “Zindagi kabhi yeh straight line mein nahi chalti” - life never travels in a straight line - and the higher you climb, the harder the fall when it comes.

For Imran Khan, sport was the training ground that no political school could replicate. Cricket taught him both sides of the cycle: what winning feels like and, more importantly, what losing teaches. He argues that this experience of rising and falling, of understanding that a moment of triumph is temporary, gave him a resilience that most politicians who enter the system young and stay within it never develop. The discipline of sport, he suggests, prepared him for the grinding, demoralising nature of twenty-two years in opposition before PTI came to power.

The conspiracy that removed him from office

Later in the discussion, Imran Khan turns to what he describes as the central event of his political life: his removal from the prime ministership. He is direct about his reading of events. He believes a foreign-backed conspiracy was executed through a combination of external pressure, a compliant judiciary, and Pakistani politicians who sold their votes. “Unhon ne paise chalaye, media par unko bada-bada kiya” - they ran money through the media, amplified it - and then, when the moment came to bring down the government, the groundwork had already been laid.

He is specific about the mechanics. Politicians crossed the floor after being bought. The Election Commission, whose chairman he describes as among the most corrupt officials Pakistan has seen, provided institutional cover. Courts that would move quickly on cases against PTI moved slowly or not at all against those who had openly traded their votes. He names the pattern: a model was followed, he says, similar to how other prime ministers were removed before him.

What surprised him, however, was the public reaction. He had not expected the scale of the response. “Pehli dafa maine dekha ke qaum mein khud bhi ek expect kar raha tha is raah niklegi jitna woh sadkon par nikle” - for the first time, he saw the nation come out in a way even he had not fully anticipated. People distributed sweets in the streets not to celebrate his removal, but in anger at what had been done. He describes seeing Pashtuns, Punjabis, Urdu speakers - communities that normally divide along ethnic and provincial lines - united by a single grievance.

Foreign policy and the refusal to be a tool

Muzamil pushes Imran Khan on the foreign policy dimension of his removal, and here the former prime minister is at his most emphatic. He says his position has been consistent for twenty-six years: Pakistan must never subordinate its national interest to any foreign power. He had said it before entering politics, he said it in office, and he says it now.

The specific trigger, he explains, was his refusal to cancel a visit to Russia, to limit contact with China, and to join a Western-aligned position on the Ukraine conflict. He was told to fall in line. He refused. “Meri number one priority 22 crore Pakistani hain” - my number one priority is 220 million Pakistanis - and he was not willing to compromise their interests to satisfy a foreign demand.

He draws a direct line between this stance and what he calls the catastrophe of the war on terror, in which Pakistan was used as an instrument of American policy, lost 80,000 of its own people, and received blame rather than gratitude in return. He says he made clear that he would not allow Pakistan to be used as a tissue paper again. This, he argues, is what made him unacceptable to those who wanted a more compliant government in Islamabad.

He is careful to distinguish between his policy positions and anti-Americanism. He says he has friends across the American political spectrum and has never been anti-American as a matter of principle. His objection is to a specific demand: that Pakistan abandon its sovereign interests on command.

The structural failures of governance

One of the longest and most detailed sections of the conversation concerns what Imran Khan learned during his three and a half years in office - years he describes as the hardest of his life, but also the most instructive. The central lesson is about the gap between having power and being able to use it.

He describes arriving in government with a thin parliamentary majority, which meant that every budget vote, every piece of legislation, every reform was hostage to the arithmetic of a coalition. “Hum har waqt 133 ki ginti chalegi ya nahi” - we were always counting whether 133 votes would hold - and that constant vulnerability made structural reform nearly impossible.

Beyond the numbers, he found that the institutions themselves had been captured. Regulators meant to protect the public interest had been hollowed out. He gives the example of the Competition Commission, which had been paralysed for eleven years by cases filed by the very cartels it was supposed to discipline. Sugar mafias, oil marketing cartels, cement cartels - all had found ways to tie the hands of the bodies that should have held them accountable.

He also reflects on the difficulty of bringing in outside expertise. Ministries, he says, were staffed by networks loyal to the old system. When he tried to bring in professionals from outside, those professionals were either intimidated or found the environment impossible to work in and left. “Agar mujhe sahi mayne mein azadi nahi milegi, main power mein aana hi nahi chahta” - if I am not given genuine freedom to act, I do not want to come to power - because without that freedom, the exercise is meaningless.

The justice system and the powerful

Running through the entire conversation is Imran Khan’s argument that Pakistan’s fundamental problem is not a shortage of resources or talent, but the absence of a justice system capable of holding the powerful to account. He cites a panel report - he attributes it to a UN-linked body - estimating that 1.7 trillion dollars leaves developing countries annually through corruption, ending up in Western bank accounts and property markets. The poor get poorer, he says, because the money that should build their countries is being stolen and parked abroad.

He frames this in moral terms as well as political ones. He invokes the example of the Prophet’s time in Medina, arguing that the society built there was founded on the principle that the law applies equally to the strong and the weak - and that when a society loses that principle, it loses everything. “Jab tak unke andar yeh jazba ho ke takatwar ko pakde” - until the institutions have the spirit to catch the powerful - nothing will change.

He is direct about what he saw in his own time in office. Corrupt figures were on bail. The Sharif family, the Zardari family - cases open, convictions on record - were brought back into power through what he calls a managed arrangement. Those who sold their votes to bring down his government faced no legal consequences. The contrast with how PTI members were treated by the courts, he argues, is not subtle.

Youth, culture, and the long game

Muzamil raises the question of Pakistan’s young population - he notes that a very large share of the country is under eighteen - and what Imran Khan’s government was actually doing for them. This opens a wide-ranging section of the conversation covering education, media, culture, and what Imran Khan calls the family system.

He is critical of the content environment Pakistani children grow up in. Seventy television channels, he says, and not one programme designed to inspire children scientifically or intellectually. He contrasts this with what he observed in India, where content - whether on YouTube or television - is built to motivate young people. He argues that when you give children no inspirational content and flood the media environment with vulgarity imported from cultures whose own family systems have collapsed, the consequences are direct and measurable. He cites rising rates of child abuse in Pakistan as one indicator.

He connects this to his broader argument about cultural sovereignty. Pakistan, he says, imports cultural content wholesale without asking which elements serve its own values and which undermine them. He brought the Turkish historical drama Ertugrul to Pakistani television, he explains, precisely to show audiences a cultural product rooted in a similar value system - one that did not require Pakistanis to absorb the assumptions of Hollywood or Bollywood along with the entertainment.

On youth participation in politics, he pushes back against the idea that young people lack the understanding to be involved. He argues the opposite: youth brings passion and a clarity of moral vision that tends to erode with age and compromise. The energy of young people is not a liability to be managed but a resource to be mobilised. He says PTI’s internal elections, though imperfect in execution, were a genuine attempt to build a party structure that could produce leaders from below rather than impose them from above.

Two roads

By the end of the conversation, Imran Khan frames Pakistan’s situation in terms he returns to repeatedly: two roads. One is the road of dependency, of accepting foreign direction, of allowing the corrupt to remain in power in exchange for stability and access to credit. That road, he says, looks easier. It offers short-term relief. But it leads, eventually, to a deeper humiliation.

The other road is harder. It requires the country to stand on its own feet, to insist on an independent foreign policy, to build institutions that apply the law equally, and to refuse to be used by outside powers. He draws on the example of the state of Medina - a community that faced the full force of the superpowers of its time and refused to compromise its principles - as the model he believes Pakistan should aspire to.

“Do raste hain,” he says - there are two roads - and there is no neutral position between them. To stand aside when the powerful are looting is not neutrality; it is a choice for the wrong side. He ends with what he describes as his honest assessment: that for the first time in his twenty-six years in politics, he sees the Pakistani public making the choice for the harder road. Whether the institutions will allow that choice to be expressed in a free election is, he says, the question on which everything now depends.