An Order, a Test, a Captain

Pushp Saraf

pushpsaraf@yahoo.com

However hard Pakistan's establishment strives to push its jailed former prime minister out of the frame, Imran Khan keeps walking back into it. The latest instance is the manner in which the government has dealt with the Supreme Court's directive of August 18, which ordered that he be moved from Adiala jail in Rawalpindi to Islamabad's Shifa International Hospital, a private facility, for examination and treatment until the next hearing on September 16.

He was not taken there. The government led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) first sought a review of the order, calling it discriminatory and beyond the court's jurisdiction. The registrar's office returned that petition over objections; on the ground, nothing changed. In the early hours of August 21, Imran was driven not to Shifa but to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), a public sector hospital.

What did not happen at PIMS has produced the bigger controversy. Imran underwent an eye procedure and a set of diagnostic tests, but not the CT coronary angiography that a PIMS cardiologist had himself recommended on August 1, after recording fluctuating blood pressure, palpitations, headaches and restlessness in a 73-year-old man who has spent three years in near-isolation. A CTA identifies coronary blockages and assesses the risk of a heart attack; it is not an exotic procedure. Hospital staff said the facility was unavailable. Imran was then declared "100 per cent medically fit" by a state-appointed team rather than the medical board the Supreme Court had directed and taken back to Adiala.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif moved swiftly to contain the anger, constituting an inquiry committee under the secretary of the Establishment Division, the government's human resource and administrative arm, to establish the facts and fix responsibility. The explanations offered since have not converged. One version, attributed to senior PIMS doctors, is that the cardiac centre has only a conventional angiography facility, that the CTA machine sits in the radiology department, and that nobody thought to refer him across. In that event it was a failure of inter-departmental coordination, compounded by his being brought in at night, unannounced and unregistered. Another version is that the test was not clinically necessary at all. On August 25, the PIMS administration issued a statement insisting that its CT machine, installed in 2022, remains functional, and cautioning against reading too much into the choice of one imaging procedure over another.

More questions than answers

That denial is unlikely to settle anything. It is not merely because feelings are running high. It comes from an institution that is itself the subject of the inquiry and it answers a question nobody was asking. The issue was never whether a working machine existed somewhere on the premises. It is why a test ordered by the government's own cardiologist three weeks earlier went unperformed on a prisoner whom the state had gone to considerable trouble not to take to the hospital the court had named.

Whatever the Establishment Division panel eventually reports, a finding that absolves officialdom will carry little conviction. Nor is PIMS a witness whose word can close the matter. On August 26 the institution, which is a complex of several hospitals and teaching institutes, was overtaken by a catastrophe of its own, a fire in its gynaecology ward in which, by early accounts, 14 infants were "completely burnt". An establishment absorbing a disaster of that order is not one whose assurances about its own machinery will be taken on trust.

Meanwhile, the man at the centre of the dispute remains, to a generation across the subcontinent, the only captain to have won Pakistan a cricket World Cup, in 1992. That standing travels. It is not for nothing that 21 former international captains of major cricket-playing nations wrote to Shehbaz Sharif on August 23, asking for humane treatment, an independent assessment of his health and the restoration of his weekly family visits: "Whatever the legal and political arguments surrounding his case, the basic decency of ensuring a court-ordered medical process is actually completed, is not, in our view, a controversial request". It was their second such letter within six months; the first, in February, carried 14 signatures. Among the signatories are our own Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Dilip Vengsarkar, alongside Clive Lloyd, Allan Border and the Chappell brothers. They have been careful to draw a line: Khan's politics is his own affair, and they write, in their words, not as politicians but as "former colleagues and rivals who share a bond forged on the cricket field" that "transcends the borders and disputes that too often divide countries".

For many, a captain forever

In Pakistan's political life, that cricketing past has done more than lend colour. It is why he is still called, simply, the captain. Even his fellow Pakistan cricketers closed ranks around him in 2023, when a crude attempt was made, in changed political circumstances, to strike his name from a list of the country's cricketing greats. Men with every professional reason to stay quiet did not.

It is an emotional hold that three years in prison have not loosened. Experienced observers believe that Imran's popularity persists despite his imprisonment, and despite his party's own lack of performance, because of the PML-N government's all-round failure marked by the erosion of basic amenities and of economic opportunity and worsened by high taxes. A leader in Adiala cannot be held responsible for the price of electricity. That is the arithmetic the establishment has not found a way to solve.

His own party, after initial setbacks and desertions, remains steadfastly behind him. But Imran is also becoming a rallying point for opposition parties with no stake in the PTI's fortunes, which have nonetheless expressed their disapproval of his constant hounding. The PTI, for its part, has planned a long march on September 27 to press its demand for his release. The party has stood firm against tremendous pressure, and it governs Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of Pakistan's four provinces. KP Chief Minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi announced on August 23 that the party's ultimate goal is securing Imran's release. He said he would lead the march to the point of no return, ensuring its climax in either "azadi", Imran's release from prison, or "shahadat", martyrdom, as there was no other option. Describing Imran as a symbol of unity, Afridi asserted that he alone could restore the dignity of the institutions, save the state, improve the country's financial situation and preserve the integrity of Pakistan.

That is the vocabulary of a movement that has stopped expecting anything from process. It may be worth asking who taught it to stop expecting.

This is not cricket

On the larger opposition spectrum, Imran's name figures frequently as concrete moves are afoot to forge a collective parliamentary strategy to corner the government on violence, the economic crisis and political repression. Opposition parties have accused the government of staging a "drama" over Imran's health and of ignoring judicial decisions in denying him treatment. They have declared "100 percent solidarity" with the PTI. The political environment is likely to be further electrified when the fate of the PTI's contempt of court petition, filed against the Government's defiance of the highest court, is decided.

For its part, the Government has been beating about the bush. It has argued, among other things, that PTI workers created a security situation which forced it to take Imran to PIMS rather than to Shifa International. Few are convinced. Why should PTI workers obstruct the treatment of their own leader? The plea has exposed only the government's inability and its unwillingness to implement a simple court direction.

A state that cannot move one prisoner across one city to a hospital named in a court order is not displaying strength. It is advertising the opposite. Small wonder, then, that sportsmen of world renown, who normally keep well clear of political matters, have felt obliged to say out loud that this is not cricket.