Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, a cricketing hero-turned-politician who was arrested on Tuesday, whipped up common help amid decades-high inflation and a crippling financial slowdown earlier than his ouster final 12 months.

The 70-year-old has since confirmed no signal of slowing down, even after being wounded in a November assault on his convoy as he lead a protest march to Islamabad calling for snap normal elections.

Khan had for months averted arrest in a variety of circumstances registered towards him that embrace costs of instigating crowds to violence. There have been huge protests towards earlier makes an attempt to arrest him.

Khan was pushed out of the premiership in April final 12 months amid public frustration at excessive inflation, rising deficits and endemic corruption that he had promised to stamp out.

The Supreme Courtroom overturned his choice to dissolve parliament and defections from his ruling coalition meant he misplaced the no-confidence vote that adopted.

That put him amongst an extended record of elected Pakistani prime ministers who’ve didn’t see out their full phrases – none has carried out so since independence in 1947.

In 2018, the cricket legend who led Pakistan to its solely World Cup win in 1992, rallied the nation behind his imaginative and prescient of a corruption-free, affluent nation revered overseas. However the firebrand nationalist’s fame and charisma weren’t sufficient.

As soon as criticised for being underneath the thumb of the highly effective army institution, Khan’s ouster got here following worsening relations between him after which military chief Basic Qamar Javed Bajwa.

The army, which has an outsized position in Pakistan having dominated the nation for almost half of its historical past and received management over a few of its greatest financial establishments, has stated it stays impartial in the direction of politics.

SUDDEN RISE

However Khan is once more among the many nation’s hottest leaders, in line with native polls.

His rise to energy in 2018 came visiting twenty years after he first launched his political occasion, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), or Pakistan Motion for Justice occasion, in 1996.

Regardless of his fame and standing as a hero in cricket-mad Pakistan, PTI languished in Pakistan’s political wilderness, not profitable a seat apart from Khan’s for 17 years.

In 2011, Khan started drawing large crowds of younger Pakistanis disillusioned with endemic corruption, power electrical energy shortages and crises in schooling and unemployment.

He drew even higher backing within the ensuing years, with educated Pakistani expatriates leaving their jobs to work for his occasion and pop musicians and actors becoming a member of his marketing campaign.

His purpose, Khan instructed supporters in 2018, was to show Pakistan from a rustic with a “small group of rich and a sea of poor” into an “instance for a humane system, a simply system, for the world, of what an Islamic welfare state is”.

That 12 months he was victorious, marking a uncommon ascension by a sporting hero to the top of politics. Observers cautioned, nevertheless, that his greatest enemy was his personal rhetoric, having raised supporters’ hopes sky excessive.

PLAYBOY TO REFORMER

Born in 1952, the son of a civil engineer, Khan grew up with 4 sisters in an prosperous city Pashtun household in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-biggest metropolis.

After a privileged schooling, he went on to the College of Oxford the place he graduated with a level in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

As his cricket profession flourished, he developed a playboy fame in London within the late Nineteen Seventies.

In 1995, he married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of enterprise tycoon James Goldsmith. The couple, who had two sons collectively, divorced in 2004. A second marriage to TV journalist Reham Nayyar Khan additionally led to divorce.

His third marriage to Bushra Bibi, a non secular chief whom Khan had come to know throughout his visits to a thirteenth century shrine in Pakistan, mirrored his deepening curiosity in Sufism – a type of Islamic apply that emphasises non secular closeness to God.

As soon as in energy, Khan launched into his plan of constructing a “welfare” state modelled on what he stated was an excellent system relationship again to the Islamic world some 14 centuries earlier.

However his anti-corruption drive was closely criticised as a software for sidelining political opponents – a lot of whom have been imprisoned on costs of graft.

Pakistan’s generals additionally remained highly effective and army officers, retired and serving, have been positioned in command of greater than a dozen civilian establishments.