imran khan

 After Quaid-e-Azam and Liaquat Ali Khan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was a leader who had powerful leadership capabilities and a charismatic personality. Except Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Muhammad khan Junejo played a vital role in the history of Pakistan but unfortunately, he got less time to serve the country due to some political reasons. Then comes the name of another good leader Benazir Bhutto (Late), she had broad vision and power to bring the favorable change.
This country suffered a lot because of acute shortage of visionary leadership. Fortunately, Pakistan is blessed with a person who is a devoted leader in a true sense and his name is Imran Khan; chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-E-Insaf.
Imran Khan is chancellor of the Bred Ford University, ex-captain of Pakistan Cricket Team and founder of Shoukat Khanum Memorial Hospital where 75% of the deserving patients gets free treatment.
Education:
Imran Khan was born on 25 November 1952 in the heart of Pakistan- Lahore. He is son of a civil engineer, Ikramullah Khan Niazi and his mother’s name was Shoukat khanum. He acquired his preliminary education from high-level Institute Cathedral School and then he got his higher education from Royal Grammar school of England and Aitcheson College, Lahore. In 1972, he enrolled to Keble College, Oxford for the degree in Economics and Political science.
Cricket Career:
Khan Sahab joined Pakistan cricket team and became a popular cricketer of Pakistan. He was the only caption until now who managed to win the ICC world cup 1992. He is the eighth cricketer of the world in the category of all-rounder cricketers with 3807 runs and 362 wickets in Test matches.
Political leader:
After his successful career in cricket, Imran Khan entered in the politics of Pakistan in 1996 when he announced his own political party-Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. He was elected as the member of National Assembly from 2002 – 2007. His gradual struggle transformed PTI into a strong political party. According to the recent survey, PTI is the most popular political party of the Pakistan. Imran Khan became the popular leader because of his zeal, enthusiasm and his mission. His political agenda included following key objectives:
• Freedom for everyone
• Eradication of corruption
• Independent judiciary
• Bringing a positive change in the country
His party is introducing new ways of leadership, new horizons of progress and many promises have been made by Imran Khan. Only time can prove that the pre-election promises would be fulfilled or not because it is a tradition in Pakistan that most of the political parties forget about the promises which they usually make for the betterment of the country.
Key Note:
The people of Pakistan have always tested the nerves of PPP, PML (N) and PML (Q) leadership. But the history has revealed that most of the leadership in these parties have self-oriented agendas therefore they were unable to bring any betterment in the country. They prefer to serve their selfish interests rather than serving the nation. So, this is the right time that we should decide whether a new zealous and committed leadership should be given a chance or not. To me, it is the ripe time that we must vote in favor of PTI rather than casting vote for looters and aggrandizes
I’m not Pakistani, and for me to make pronouncements or pass judgment on Pakistani domestic politics would be presumptuous. But several Pakistani friends have asked me to write about Imran Khan. I do so now, albeit hesitantly, because what he represents is an important subject at this pregnant historical moment.

I’ll start by highlighting points made recently by two Pakistani writers. In a long and excellent profile in the magazine The Caravan, Madiha Tahir writes: “The political worldview of the middle and upper classes — whether it’s the politics of personal expression and individual rights, moral outrage against corruption, or the outspoken embrace of tradition and piety — has almost no point of overlap with the needs and desires of millions of Pakistanis who are too poor to exercise meaningful choice in such matters.”

This cuts close to something Westerners and some Pakistani liberals willfully fail to understand about Pakistan: that it’s not really feasible to promote both Western-style or Western-leaning secular liberalism and the interests and aspirations of the much larger numbers of the Pakistani rural and urban poor. Which gets in turn to a very interesting contradiction in Imran’s own character and position: he is an elitist populist. He is “at his strongest,” writes Madiha Tahir, “delivering a trenchant critique of the often self-satisfied assumptions that underpin secular liberalism.”

On AlJazeera.com, Akbar Ahmed, professor at American University in Washington, DC and former Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK, begins with an obvious but crucial point: “There is a direct correlation between the depths of the gloom in Pakistan and the high expectations of salvation from Imran Khan. It is clear that the greater the despair in the country, the more fervent the hopes in one man as saviour.”

And he cautions: “There are already danger-signs as some old faces who have done the rounds with different parties have now jumped onto Imran’s bandwagon. The balance between making deals in order to chip away at the power base of the ruling Zardari-Bhutto dynasty and the Sharif one, and maintaining his integrity will be crucial.”

So, what do I think about Imran Khan? I don’t know the man and, again, I’m not Pakistani, but I’ve come to admire both his tenacity and his evidently genuine integrity and patriotism. And he seems to be channeling something both authentically and appropriately Islamic. But all this is not necessarily to say that I think he should lead Pakistan, or that he should want to. I certainly wouldn’t want to!

Imran has been hanging in there on the fringes of Pakistani politics for so long now that it’s easy to dismiss him or take him for granted. That’s understandable. But political credibility can consist in things other than National Assembly seats, and the enormous crowds who attended Imran’s recent rallies in Lahore and Karachi suggest that Pakistan might have crossed a Rubicon, or be approaching one. Whether the change that’s coming will be for the better, we can’t yet know. I do know from 17 years’ acquaintance that, for all its appalling inequities and glaring faults and notwithstanding the obstacles thrown in its path by not-so-friendly (not only imagined but also real) “foreign hands,” the Pakistani society does have the capacity to absorb such a change, and to become a better version of itself. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful and enterprising people I know. They’ve had to be, ever since 1947.

Imran is tapping into the natural urge all humans share — it’s part of what makes us human, by definition — to live above the level of material, moral, and social squalor, to be something better than cynical. And he’s absolutely justified and right to appeal to Pakistanis’ self-respect by telling them, essentially, that they don’t need, and shouldn’t want, to rely on aid or instruction from the United States. The challenge, as Prof. Ahmed alludes above, is what portion of the potential can be realised in the real world, where the rubber meets the political road. Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.

So I’ll end these musings on a cautionary note, by telling the story of the press conference I attended at Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s famous house in Rangoon in November 1995. Suu Kyi had been released from house arrest a few months earlier, and her National League for Democracy had called the press conference to announce that they were suspending their participation in the military junta’s phony constitutional convention. It was both a stand on principle and an admirable attempt to take initiative and claim political space.

But I wasn’t convinced. The article I wrote for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, began: “Aung San Suu Kyi’s claim to the moral high ground in Burma may be indisputable. But her party seems headed down a slippery slope toward political irrelevance.” Those two sentences led to the severing of my relationship with The Globe and Mail, because I didn’t toe its wishful line, which held essentially that because Aung San Suu Kyi should prevail, therefore she would. It isn’t that easy.

Then again, making a difference usually requires staying power and years in the wilderness. Things are finally looking a little more hopeful in Burma. Could they be in Pakistan as well? If so, then I feel sure Imran Khan has a role to play.