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The man that Pakistan can jail but not erase

April 21, 2026

Imran Khan: From cricket legend to Prisoner No. 804.

By Rana Ayyub

A supporter of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and jailed former prime minister Imran Khan holds a placard during a protest rally in Sydney on August 4, 2024, demanding Khan’s release from the jail. (Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images)

Islamabad may have succeeded in removing Imran Khan the man from the public eye. Erasing Khan the living symbol of national pride has proved far more difficult.

Even in physical confinement, Pakistan’s most famous cricketer turned politician remains omnipresent.

Since his arrest in 2023, the former Pakistani prime minister has been held in a high-security jail outside Rawalpindi. Courts have convicted him multiple times on corruption and other charges, producing sentences that combined together stretch for decades.

Over almost three years of confinement, the most recognizable person in a country of more than 250 million people has been seen publicly only in a few leaked screenshots from a single video hearing.

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But the void Khan left behind has developed its own magnetism. Among Pakistanis scattered across Britain and the United States, Khan’s absence from public life has only deepened his appeal.

False rumors of his death — #WhereIsImranKhan — have gone viral on social media. Khan’s prisoner number, 804, has turned into a rallying point. Printed on jerseys and T-shirts sold on platforms such as Amazon and Etsy, the number has become a political shorthand for Khan’s legions of supporters — put to song and placed on license plates and chanted at sports events.

He casts a shadow over major geopolitical events, too. As the Iran war escalated in March, Khan’s supporters circulated an old clip of him from the World Economic Forum in Davos warning that a clash between Washington and Tehran would destabilize the world.

At a Muslim community evening that I attended last year on Long Island, Ahmed Bilal, a young mechanic visiting friends, scrolled his phone. The last hundred videos he posted on TikTok were all about Khan. “I would give my life for him,” Bilal said to cheers. At home, Bilal has magazine covers featuring Khan framed on the wall. He often dresses in the same white pathani suits that Khan favored at political rallies.

But Bilal was barely 3 when Khan led Pakistan to victory at the 1992 Cricket World Cup. The Imran Khan he knows is not a cricketer but a political legend who circulates endlessly in social media clips and is celebrated at gatherings of Pakistan’s large diaspora.

Some of Khan’s supporters share a love for President Donald Trump, too, with posters at American rallies saying: “Two great leaders fighting for their nations.” The clear hope is that Trump will use his power to draw global attention to — or even end — Khan’s imprisonment.

The thread running through it all is antiestablishment defiance and nationalist appeal, and it adds up to a lesson in futility for the Pakistani government. There can be no silencing a man with close to 60 million followers across social media platforms in the age of reels and TikTok trends.

Even as he sits in a prison cell wholly cut off from the world.

Few political figures have lived as many public lives as Imran Khan: playboy cricketer, global celebrity, populist reformer and now perhaps the world’s most recognizable jailed politician.

Khan was a legend long before he entered politics. In the 1980s, he was among the most charismatic figures in international cricket — tall, Oxford-educated and comfortable in London’s elite social circles. Tabloids and fashion magazines treated him more like a movie star than an athlete, endlessly chronicling his romances and nightlife. Back on the subcontinent, Khan was the heartthrob of millions.

Not all the attention Khan received was flattering. In the late 1990s, a court in Los Angeles ruled that he was the father of Tyrian White, the daughter of socialite Sita White — a claim he has long disputed. His carefully cultivated image as an international playboy also invited criticism in Pakistan, where it clashed with more conservative social norms and fed a perception of him as out of step with the country he would later seek to lead. Years later, when he became prime minister, critics argued that his rise had been enabled by the very military establishment his supporters now accuse of silencing him.

Yet the image that defines him has always come from the cricket field: In 1992, Khan captained Pakistan to its first and only World Cup victory. For millions of Pakistanis he became something larger than a sportsman. He was a living symbol of national pride.

That fame eventually evolved into political ambition. In 1996, Khan founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party promising to challenge corruption and build a welfare state inspired by the ideals of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

For years the project seemed improbable. Critics dismissed Khan as a celebrity dabbling in politics, and his party struggled to win seats. But Khan persisted, and his anti-corruption, anti-imperialist message gained traction with younger voters frustrated by dynastic politics and economic inequality. By 2018, he finally achieved what once seemed unlikely: He became Pakistan’s prime minister.

At its height, Khan’s charismatic political appeal was not confined to Pakistan. I remember watching his speech at the U.N. General Assembly in 2019 while sitting with a Middle Eastern ambassador in Johannesburg.

 When he finished, the small group of us in the room fell silent before she stood and applauded. To many Muslims around the world, Khan was speaking not just as a Pakistani politician but as a global critic of the international order.

But wielding power proved more complicated than outsider opposition. Khan’s election campaign was heavily built on a promise to create “Naya Pakistan” — a new Pakistan. He promised Pakistanis that he would rid the country of corruption in 90 days and fix its economy. But by 2019 his government had to be bailed out through a $6 billion package from the International Monetary Fund.

Still, Khan’s personal life continued to fascinate the public. Khan’s third marriage, to spiritual figure Bushra Bibi, deepened an aura of mysticism that increasingly came to surround him. Bibi was married with children when she became Khan’s spiritual healer and then married him as part of some prophetic vision.

Khan claimed that he saw his wife’s unveiled face only on the night of his marriage, a far cry from his flamboyant relationships in earlier life.

Pakistan’s powerful military, long considered the country’s ultimate political arbiter, had once been seen as quietly backing Khan’s rise. But by 2022 that relationship had fractured, turning one of the establishment’s former allies into its most vocal critic. In 2022 Khan was removed from office through a parliamentary vote of no confidence — the first Pakistani prime minister to fall that way.

The rupture exploded into the open in May 2023. At a court hearing, Pakistani paramilitary rangers smashed through glass windows to seize a visibly unaffected Khan — dramatic scenes that unfolded on Pakistani television and were broadcast globally on CNN.

Protests erupted across the country. What followed shocked even seasoned observers: Crowds stormed army buildings, torched vehicles and ransacked the residence of a senior military commander in Lahore.

The backlash was swift. Thousands of Khan’s supporters were detained, and Khan’s party’s organizational structure was largely dismantled. News outlets were effectively barred from broadcasting Khan’s name, image or speeches. Several journalists seen as sympathetic to him faced investigations and legal cases.

If the state hoped that locking up Khan would silence him and diminish his influence, digital technology complicated that calculation.

In December 2023, months after his arrest, Khan’s party produced an AI-generated political speech by its imprisoned leader. Using audio from past recordings and a speech written in prison, the party created a digital reconstruction of Khan delivering a message to the nation.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf said the video received 6 million views on social media.

Now, on diaspora social media, images of Khan sometimes appear alongside those of New York’s Democratic mayor, Zohran Mamdani — two Muslim political figures separated by a generation and very different political contexts. There is little evidence that either man has influenced the other. Yet in the imagination of online supporters, they represent a shared narrative: outspoken Muslim figures challenging established power in the West.

Meanwhile Khan’s family has sought to internationalize his case. From London, his sons, Sulaiman and Kasim, have spoken to Western media outlets, asked for a visa to visit their father in Pakistan and urged greater scrutiny of the circumstances surrounding his imprisonment.

Pakistan has removed powerful leaders before, through exile, prison and even execution.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a public rally, while her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed in prison despite international appeals for clemency. It is this history that appears to haunt Khan’s sons. In recent interviews, they have said their father remains defiant in prison, unwilling to compromise with the country’s military establishment.

But the attempt to sideline Imran Khan is unfolding in a different era. In the digital age, confinement does not necessarily produce silence.

At the same time, Pakistan’s military establishment has sought to recast itself on the global stage, positioning the country as a mediator between the United States and Iran — a role that, even if uneven in outcome, has helped restore some of its international relevance and strengthened the hand of Khan’s opponents at home.

For a man once photographed constantly, absence has become its own form of presence.

Prisoner No. 804 is no longer just a detainee but a political idea — one that continues to circulate far beyond the walls that confine him, making his eventual return to the public stage feel less a question of if than when.

Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and author of “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.”follow on X@RanaAyyub

This article first appeared in Washington Post

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