Complete Biographical History of Imran Khan - III

Continued......

Our Failed Democracy, 1988-1993

AS THE COUNTRY continued its downward trajectory in the 1980s and 1990s, crippled by its own leadership regardless of dictatorship or democracy, about the only thing we still did well was play cricket, hockey and squash. My one contribution to restoring some of our battered national self-esteem was to lead our team in winning the World Cup in 1992. While I think the lowest point for the country's morale was when we lost East Pakistan, the highest was winning the World Cup. It was perhaps the last time Pakistan was united as everyone joined together to celebrate. When we arrived back in Lahore with the trophy, people lined the streets for miles. Watching the sheer joy on their faces gave me a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. I led the country to victory on the cricket field, but had yet to feel the need to mirror that leadership in politics. 

In July 1988 while I was playing for Sussex and living in London, I got an unusual call from Pakistan. It was my friend Ashraf Nawabi, who was close to Zia. He asked if I would become a minister in the general's cabinet. Zia had just dismissed the elected government of Muhammad Khan Junejo, who was probably the most decent prime minister Pakistan had ever had. Junejo was from Sindh province, and Zia had assumed that he would be very pliable and docile. But Junejo made the mistake of trying to assert himself, including on the issue of Zia' s refusal to sign the Geneva Accords that would end the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He also tried to introduce an austerity campaign. Unlike many of Pakistan's rulers, who seem to want to live in the grandeur of Mughal emperors, Junejo led by example, driving a Pakistani-made Suzuki in an attempt to encourage cabinet members and the military to ditch their luxury imported cars. Nawabi's offer took me completely by surprise. I declined it politely, saying that I was not qualified for the job. A day later Dr Anwar ul-Haq, Zia's younger son, called me up and urged me to join the government for the sake of the country. He said his father was sick of corrupt politicians who were only in politics to further their personal interests. People of integrity like me were needed in the cabinet, he said. This seemed rather ironic given that Zia had done so much damage to democracy and rule of law in Pakistan, particularly with his non-party-based elections. I was flattered but again declined. 

Shortly after that phone call, Zia died, killed, along with the top ranks of his army and the serving American ambassador to Pakistan, in a mysterious plane crash. I was in the south of France on holiday when I heard. It was quite a shock. Almost as much as with Bhutto. The cause of the accident remains a mystery but there are plenty of conspiracy theories. In Pakistan there was a suspicion that the CIA had a hand in it, that Zia was bumped off the moment he moved away from Washington's script and no longer served its purpose. After his death there was the same feeling as, years later, after Musharraf left - euphoria that we would be free again from dictatorship, corruption and media suppression to resume our journey towards true democracy. The election three months later of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's daughter Benazir as prime minister, the first open elections in a decade, ushered in a new period. Like all Pakistanis I had great expectations of her. With her understanding of Western democratic societies and her education at Oxford and Harvard, she was ideally placed to bring in a new era for our country. She was well off and didn't need the money that came with power - or so we thought. She had everything going for her. She was popular in Pakistan and one of the best-known Muslim faces in the West. In fact the Western media was totally enamoured of her - the glamorous daughter of a charismatic democratic leader who had been hanged by a military dictator, and, to top it all, the first female prime minister of a Muslim state. In front of the Western media, Benazir played the role of being the exotic 'daughter of the East' to perfection. 

Of course there was an early warning sign even before she came to power. Her greatest betrayal was of the thousands of people who worked for the party founded by her father, the PPP, who had endured years in jail striving for democracy during Zia's martial law, in completely abandoning the mission statement of the People's Party, of having a 'just and egalitarian society and having social justice' - all that was cast off. She further made a mockery of democracy by competing with Nawaz Sharif, then chief minister of the Punjab and later to be her successor as prime minister, to buy off independent MPs. In the absence of ideology, politicians were auctioned and independents were bombarded with lucrative offers for them and their families. The term 'Changa Manga' politics or culture in Pakistan stems from Sharif paying off and then literally locking up a group of provincial MPs in an isolated rest house in the forest of Changa Manga outside Lahore so that the PPP could not make them a counter-offer. 

It was not long before all of us were disappointed by Benazir. She began to behave more like an empress than a democratically elected prime minister. After her death William Dalrymple described finding her 'majestic, even imperial' on interviewing her when she was prime minister. 'She walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner and frequently used the royal "we",' he noted. I have to say that these imperial traits were already evident when she was young. The first time I met her she was tearing a man to shreds for daring to question her socialist credentials. As a student at Oxford I shared a house with Zia Malik, the brother of the actor Art Malik. One day I came home and could hear a woman's voice arguing as I locked up my bike outside the house. Zia had invited some of the other Pakistanis at Oxford round to meet Benazir. However, he had managed to enrage the guest of honour by complaining that effective land reforms had not been implemented in Sindh. It was obviously a sensitive topic for Benazir, as her father had made a token attempt to undermine the power of the feudal landlords with some limited land reform in 1972. I tried to calm Benazir down and after that initial meeting we became good friends. She had a reputation for being polite to the English and imperious with fellow Pakistanis. I remember seeing her at a reception in 1974 held by the Pakistani embassy in the Netherlands in honour of the visiting Pakistan cricket team. Aged only about twenty, she was ordering the ambassador around as if he was her personal servant. To the bemusement of me and the rest of the team, the poor man was scurrying round moving chairs and tables for her. 

It was also quite obvious that Benazir was ambitious from a young age. She stayed on at Oxford for an extra year after I left and I always presumed it was because she was so determined to become president of the Oxford Union. Benazir's problem, though, was that her first ever job was being prime minister. And she only became prime minister because she was her father's daughter Gust as her son Bilawal became chairman of the PPP at the age of nineteen because he is his mother's son). Benazir had struggled, spending six months in jail and several years in and out of house arrest, but she had not had to fight her way to the top of her party, nor spend years in the political frontline, fighting her party's cause. That is not to underestimate the suffering that years of confinement must have caused such a young woman, but it is not preparation for leading a country. How on earth can you run a country when your first job is to be prime minister? She had not been tested by the rigours of the journey towards leadership, nor developed a vision or ideology, nor learned about management or institution building. 

To become a general in the army. or a chief executive of a company. there is a long process of acquiring skills and accumulating responsibilities. Family dynasties in politics inevitably lead to incompetent leadership and decay. Their dominance of South Asian politics is precisely why true democracy has foundered in the region. A meritocratic system is vital for democracy. In some ways dynastic politics is even worse than a monarchical system. At least with a monarchy a prince or princess is given a grounding in the art of leadership. Bilawal Bhutto. a young man who has spent half his life outside Pakistan. is far less equipped to lead than. for example. the UK' s Prince Charles. 

If Benazir was woefully inexperienced for the job. she was also unfortunate in her choice of husband. Asif Ali Zardari. The son of a feudal family. he had achieved little in life off the polo field. In her defence. Benazir's position did not make it easy for her to find a decent husband. By the time she came to marry. at the age of thirty-four. she was already considered old by Pakistani bride standards. Besides. her family was hounded by the Zia regime. so people were terrified of associating with them. It is very dangerous to be on the wrong side of politics in Pakistan. It was therefore difficult for her to meet normal people. I introduced her to a cousin. Qamar Khan. at one point and they thought about marriage but then Al-Zulfiqar. the organization set up by her brothers to avenge their father's execution. hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines flight in 1981 and she was thrown back in jail. By the time she emerged. Qamar Khan had married a wife chosen by his family. So she ended up with Zardari. whom she loved so much that she gave him free rein to use his position to amass as much power and money as possible. He treated Pakistan as his personal estate and considered it his feudal right to abuse power and take commissions on government contracts (with estates in France and - though now sold - in Surrey. it was clear where the money was going). Soon he was known as Mr Ten Percent. although from my one and only meeting with him I can say his price was double that. 

The construction of the hospital. about which more later. gave me an insight into the way he worked. In 1989. I went to Benazir's home. Bilawal House. in Karachi to ask for assistance in raising funds for the hospital. Since I was trying to help compensate for the lack of social services provided by the government. I thought I would get help in kick-starting the project. She was busy. so we were given an audience with Zardari. Since I had been friendly with Benazir at Oxford. I expected a sympathetic hearing. He was charming and extremely flattering towards me. However. he offered no help. and instead spent most of the time talking to my friend Tariq Shafi. Tariq comes from one of Pakistan's most powerful textile-industrialist families and Zardari asked him to set up a couple of factories in Sindh. pPP's stronghold. saying he needed to provide some employment in the province. He suggested that if 20 per cent of the shares in the business were given to him. he would remove all 'bureaucratic hurdles' and help obtain loans from the nationalized banks. Needless to say. no help on the hospital was ever forthcoming. either from Benazir or her husband. 

So imagine my surprise five years later when a week before the opening of the hospital I had an unexpected visit from an old friend called Navaid Malik. whom I had not seen for years. Bhutto was at that point in her second term of office. after being dismissed in 1990 on charges of corruption and incompetence and then voted in again in 1993. Navaid brought a message from her and Zardari saying they wanted to honour our hospital by cutting the ribbon. Although the hospital had already started operating on a small scale. we had set the official opening date for 29 December 1994 and had decided that the ribbon would be cut by our first cancer patient. a ten-year-old girl from a poor family called Sumera Yousaf. Ordinarily it would be flattering for any institution to have the prime minister opening it. but of course I refused. I was later to learn the cost of snubbing the royal couple's request. Benazir had become quite unpopular because of corruption scandals surrounding her husband and had presumably wanted to cash in on the euphoria in the country surrounding the opening of the hospital. Besides, my recent six-week campaign around Pakistan to raise money for the project had been seen by her and Zardari as politically threatening. The trip had in fact been a little like an election campaign, with thousands of ordinary Pakistanis turning out on to the streets to give me money. Some of them asked me to come into politics as they made their donations; and for the first time the media started talking about my entering the political fray. 

In between Benazir's two terms in office, Nawaz Sharif had come into power. After two years of her and Zardari, people thought he could only be an improvement. However, rather than building up the country, he expanded his own industrial empire. It grew at a phenomenal rate under government patronage - a staggering 4,000 per cent from 1985 to 1992. He was just as corrupt as Benazir and Zardari; he simply went about it in a different way. He perfected the art of buying politicians. When I first met Sharif in the late 1970s at a cricket club, he seemed like a regular guy with little drive or ambition, more interested in cricket than politics. I think his real dream would have been to be captain of the Pakistani cricket team. He just loved the glamour of the sport. 

An incident happened in autumn 1987 which illustrates Sharif's mindset. Just before the World Cup in October 1987, when I was captaining Pakistan, we played a warm-up match against the West Indies at the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore. Moments before the match, the secretary of the cricket board, Shahid Rafi, informed me that the Chief Minister of Punjab, Nawaz Sharif, was going to captain the team that day. I was taken aback but then assumed that he would have a non-playing role and wanted to watch the match from the dressing-room. Therefore I was shocked to see him walk out to toss the coin with Viv Richards, the West Indian captain, dressed in his cricket whites; but there was a bigger shock to come. He won the toss, and returned to the dressing-room and started putting on his pads. None of the team could believe what we were seeing; he was going to open the innings with Mudassar Nazar against the West Indies, one of the greatest fast-bowling attacks in cricket history. Nazar wore batting pads, a thigh pad, chest pad, an arm guard, a helmet and reinforced batting gloves, while Sharif simply had his batting pads, a floppy hat - and a smile. 

For those who are not conversant with cricket history, it is important to know that this was a fast-bowling attack not seen before or since in the cricketing world, such was the West Indies' blistering pace, with four bowlers bowling above 90 mph. It was the sort of attack that had destroyed the careers of many a talented batsman; international batsmen, professional cricketers, who would have sleepless nights when they were due to face the West Indies. And here was Nawaz Sharif, who had no experience of playing at this level of cricket, walking out, unprotected, to face this deadly attack. Clearly he would not have the reflexes to defend himself if a short ball was aimed at his body, so there was a risk of a serious injury. I quickly inquired if there was an ambulance ready. 

As we watched the first ball - by a 6ft 6 inch West Indian fast bowler - hit the wicketkeeper's gloves even before Sharif could lift his bat, the team sighed with relief that it wasn't straight. Mercifully for Sharif, the second ball was straight at the stumps, and before he could move his stumps lay shattered. 

For those who don't understand cricket, Sharif was trying the equivalent in academic terms of a child, having just finished primary school. attempting to write a PhD thesis. When I was a schoolboy I indulged in a daydream; that I would be at a test match, the team would discover they were a player short, I would put up my hand and be brought on to suddenly become a hero. This seemed to be Sharif's dream too, as if he could by-pass the whole process of working your way up the ladder and become a hero. It was only when I started growing up, as a teenager, that I learned there are no shortcuts to achieving big dreams, there is a whole struggle a person has to go through to reach the top in any profession. Here we are talking about the chief minister of the biggest province of Pakistan having such fantasies. 

Sharif had been forced into politics by his father. who wanted to protect his business interests. Sharif had a similar handicap to Benazir. in that he was given power without ever having earned it the hard way. Through his complete loyalty and subservience to Zia. rather than experience. he proceeded quickly through the ranks of the Punjab government. progressing from finance minister to chief minister in 1985. Military dictators always look for pliable politicians and he fitted the bill perfectly. Sharif appeared to view public office not as a responsibility but as a means to get rich and once he became prime minister in 1990 many of the family assets were acquired through loans from nationalized banks that have never been paid off. The Pakistani press soon started to print allegations that senior politicians were trying to bully banks into giving them multi-million-dollar loans. Under Sharif's government. the culture of 'lifafa journalism' also sprang up - a JjfaIa is a packet. or bribe. Journalists were bought off with cash while politicians were bribed with plots of government-owned land. Sharif. like Zardari. is rumoured to be one of the richest men in Pakistan. He was dismissed amid charges of corruption after three years. only to be replaced by Bhutto in her second term. He returned to power for his second term in 1997 after Bhutto was again forced to step down - the merry-go-round of corrupt government was as dizzying to the public as to the politicians themselves. Zardari's political life is an indication of how Pakistan' s political system worked; when Benazir's government was dismissed in 1990. he went straight from the PM's house to jail. When she came back into power in 1993. he went straight from jail to the prime minister's house; and in 1996 he went from there back to jail. The moment he came back into power. all charges were dropped; our justice system could only act against those out of power. In power. the justice system became part of the executive. 

Every time Benazir or Sharif came back. one hoped that maybe they might have learned something in opposition or in exile. but to no avail. Like most people. I watched the descent of our country into corruption and lawlessness with dismay. It was in the 1990s that Pakistanis really started to lose hope in the country and there was a great brain drain as the country plunged into semi-anarchy. More or less every institution was destroyed. Corruption permeated down from the prime minister to government ministers to members of parliament. the bureaucracy. the judiciary and the police. into every stratum of society. When the Punjab inspector general of police Abbas Khan was asked by the Lahore High Court in the 1990s why the city's police were so corrupt. he reported that 25.000 policemen had not been recruited on merit and amongst them were known criminals. He blamed the situation on Nawaz Sharif's Punjab government. In Sindh. the PPP and MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement. the United National Movement) governments had done exactly the same. filling the police up with their party cadres. even though some of them had a criminal past. This destruction of our police system was done at the cost of law and order in Pakistan and it was deliberate because the police typically play a major role in manipulating the elections and intimidating the opposition. The whole moral fabric of the country began to fall apart. In 1996 Transparency International (an NCO that rates political corruption in an annual index) rated Pakistan to be the second most corrupt country out of fifty-eight. The economy fared no better. Unemployment coupled with inflation (due mainly to indirect taxes) forced people to tum to crime. The drug mafia boomed. During the 1990s economic growth. exports. revenues and development spending slipped while poverty levels rose. Economic sanctions slapped on the country following Pakistan' s first nuclear test in 1998 only added to our woes. 

What pained me in particular was the environmental and cultural destruction. For me. the beauty of Pakistan was never in our cities. it was in the mountains and the wilderness. In the UK the environmental movement had got into full swing by the 1980s while in Pakistan we were destroying everything worth preserving without any concern for future generations. I could not bear watching our forests decimated, our rivers polluted, historical monuments destroyed and above all our wildlife disappearing. Our tree cover suffered more under democratic governments, because members of the 'timber mafia' would fight elections with money made from cutting forests. 'One of the most powerful and ruthless organizations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year,' wrote the British newspaper the Guardian. In the summer of 1993 I was driving along the Karakoram Highway and saw timber - the remains of conifers hundreds of years old - lying on either side of the road for around fifty miles. I was so upset about it I wrote an open letter to the caretaker prime minister at the time, Moeen Qureshi, who had taken over after Nawaz Sharif resigned from his first term in office as prime minister. He did take measures to crack down on illegal logging but they didn't last long. The problem is that Pakistan hasn't changed the law since the days of the British - the fine is a few hundred rupees. Pakistan has one of the lowest percentages of forest cover in the world - 2.5 per cent according to a 2009 study by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. The deforestation rate stands at 2.1 per cent a year, the highest in Asia. Already limited by an arid or semi-arid climate in parts of the country, our forestry has been further decimated by large-scale deforestation and degradation. Not surprisingly floods are now a problem in many areas as a result. Successive governments have allowed Pakistan to squander both its forests and its water supplies as a growing population competes for dwindling resources. But politicians in Pakistan have no sense of the environment or of aesthetics; most of them are only interested in making a quick buck. They have houses in fancy foreign locations, their wealth is stashed abroad, they educate their children in the UK, Canada or the United States - they have no stake in the nation's future. Every time the government changes in Pakistan there is an exodus of crooked politicians who scuttle away to their safe havens abroad. There they bide their time till the new government has been discredited and then come back to start their looting and plunder again. Nor do they have any knowledge of the Pakistani countryside, rarely venturing beyond the cities. They are ignorant of Pakistan's natural treasures, and yet Islam instructs Muslims to care for the environment. 

Amidst the destruction being wrought by our politicians, Pakistan's World Cup win was a much-needed boost for national morale. The irony was that I had never planned to stay in cricket into the 1990s. I had already retired following the 1987 World Cup but a year later General Zia requested my return to the sport on national television. At a dinner organized for the team he took me into another room and warned me about what he was going to do. 'Don't humiliate me by saying no,' he said. 'I am going to ask you to come back for the sake of your country.' Touched by the appeal to my sense of patriotism, I of course had to say yes. The other reason for my return, though, was that I still had an unfulfilled longing to have a last bash at the West Indies. This was one of my great cricketing ambitions - along with winning the World Cup, and beating England and India on their home turf. I wanted to leave on a high and the chance to have another crack at the West Indians came up because Australia cancelled their tour of the West Indies in 1988 and Pakistan was invited instead. The main aim when playing them was to lose with dignity; winning was not even considered an option such was the destructive power of the West Indies juggernaut. But we were the first team in fifteen years to play them on their home turf (with home umpires) and come back with the honours - getting the better of a one-all draw. By the following year, however, I began to cut down on my cricket commitments and seriously concentrate on the hospital project. Then in 1990 Pakistan toured Australia and it was now that I noticed that running around for the hospital and not playing any first -class cricket had taken its toll on my game. I could not perform at the level that was expected of me, especially as a bowler. Yet if I flopped it would have disastrous consequences for my recently begun fundraising campaign. The problem was compounded by the weak team I was leading. A couple of top players had retired and the new ones were not up to the mark. Although we lost the series, I personally had a successful tour and went on to win ' Cricketer of the Year' in Australia as a batsman. 

I learned a lot, as the leader of the team. Cricket is the only sport where you need leadership on the pitch; no other sport gives so much of a role to the captain as in cricket, in all other sports it is the coach who is crucial. A leader on the cricket field can raise the performance of an ordinary team, whereas a poor captain can prevent a talented team from fulfilling its potential. A cricket captain, to be leader, has to lead by example - he has to show courage if he wants his team to fight. He has to be selfless if he wants his players to play for the team. He has to have integrity if he wants to command the respect of the team. Above all, in times of crisis, he must have the ability to take the pressure - that's when a team needs the leader most. 

People come under pressure when they fear failure, but it is all in the mind. Striding out to the crease, when you can be out first ball (especially when your team is in deep trouble) , if you allow yourself to feel fear, you will freeze. The fear of failure clogs the mind with negative thoughts. Even before I walked out, I would be prepared for a crisis so I would not be taken by surprise. I concentrated only on how I was going to build my innings, I would block out any thought of failure. I knew that someone who was afraid would find their hands tensing up, so I would relax my hands, keep my focus on how to organize my innings, and consciously ignore any hint of fear. When as a bowler I was at my fastest, I would watch the body language of an incoming batsman, especially the eyes, as they would reveal any traces of fear. Very rarely did they not succumb. From the middle of my career I became an expert at dealing with pressure. 

When I became captain, the great players had left and I had to lead a very inexperienced team; before entering a match, I knew that if I did not perform, the team would not win. It didn't mean I always ensured the team won, but it meant I automatically put myself under pressure. If a captain shows any weakness or buckles under pressure, the team collapses, and I knew that without my performance the team wouldn't succeed. I discovered that the most crucial time for a leader is when there's a crisis, and by constantly playing under pressure, I learned to cope with crises. The West Indies of the 1980s would always target the opposing captain, knowing that the moment the captain collapsed, so would the team. I feel my greatest achievement in my cricket career was that I was the only captain in the 1980s who played three series against the far superior West Indians and who did not lose. Every other team was crushed by them. 

When I got back from Australia in 1990 I decided I would give up the sport. I thought it best to leave on a high and I wanted to concentrate on the hospital. I simply could not risk another series and wanted to leave on my own terms rather than putting myself at the mercy of the selectors. Hardly anyone in international cricket, and particularly Pakistani cricket, leaves with dignity. Without officially announcing my retirement, I stopped playing, and spent the next six months working on the hospital and doing the things I had missed most while being on the cricket circuit - trekking in the mountains and shooting partridge. However, when I returned and told the hospital board members about my retirement plan, they were horrified. They all felt there was no way we would be able to collect significant funds for long once I was out of cricket. None of them had any idea about the game; all they noticed was the publicity in the press. I knew nothing would give more pleasure to the cricket-mad Pakistani nation than winning the 1992 World Cup held in Australia, which was at that point more than two years away. I also realized that in order to collect the vast sums of money required by the hospital my only chance lay in doing something dramatic like winning cricket's most high-profile tournament. So I started preparing a year in advance - meticulously planning the team I would need to execute my strategy. Knowing that it would be the last time I would play international cricket. I put everything into getting as fit as I could despite being thirty­ nine and way past my physical prime. 

Since I knew that the hospital's future depended upon our World Cup win. before leaving for Australia I told the hospital marketing team to prepare a strategy for fund collection in case we came home with the trophy. This was my fifth World Cup. and my third as captain. It was the only time I told the press that we would return victorious. Unfortunately my plan started going wrong the moment we landed in Australia. Our star one-day batsman Saeed Anwar and our fast bowler Waqar Younus. both key players in my strategy. both match-winners. got injured and were ruled out. (A good team is lucky to have four match-winners.) Then two days before the World Cup was to begin. I ruptured a cartilage in my shoulder. It was only when a Melbourne specialist examined me that I realized the true extent of the injury. He said I had to rest it for at least six weeks. I was shattered. It was a disaster on so many levels. Only a sportsman can understand the utter disappointment and demoralization of getting an injury after all the hard work and training that goes into preparing for a major tournament. I also realized that my not being able to play would have a devastating impact on the morale of my young team. What's more. I had staked the hospital on winning. The manager Intikhab Alam and I decided to keep my injury a secret from the team. 

My worst fears were realized when the team did disastrously without me in the two opening matches against the West Indies and England. Although over the years I had become mentally strong by taking on challenges. especially my comeback from the stress fracture in my shinbone. I would never normally have played with such an injury - mainly because I would have been too scared to fail. I would certainly not have played if the team was good enough to win without me. So I began to play by taking cortisone injections to the shoulder as well as oral painkillers. Never had I played in my 21-year career in such a bad way. So serious was my injury that after the tournament it was fully six months before I could lift a glass with my right hand without feeling a shooting pain from my right shoulder to my neck. 

Those who remember that World Cup will recollect that mid-way through the competition we were third from the bottom; the bookies rated our chances fifty-to-one. My cousin Javed Burki. who was the chairman of the selection committee as well as my childhood hero. called me up regarding the issue of sending a replacement for another injured player. He seemed to have given up on us from the tone of his voice. I told him we would win. There was silence at the other end. Later he told my sisters that he was convinced I had finally flipped. My closest English friend. Jonathan Mermagen. called me to cheer me up - as a true friend would do in bad times. It was he who broke it to me about the fifty-to-one odds. I begged him to put money on us. He did not share my faith and regrets it to this day. One of my oldest friends. Mobi. advised me not to come back to Pakistan afterwards. telling me to take a holiday in Europe for a while to let the country cool down; such was the growing hostility against me. I'm afraid every top sportsman has to accept this - the greater the public expectations. the greater the public disappointment. In the beginning when I failed to perform to the crowd's expectations I would feel self-pity and hurt when I was criticized but with time I became resigned to the rollercoaster that is sporting fame. 

In Perth the Pakistani ambassador had a dinner for the team. It was more like a funeral wake. I gave a speech and told them that I had no doubt we would win. I can still picture the look of complete bewilderment and bemusement on people' s faces as I said it. I concluded by saying that hopelessness was a sin in Islam. because it meant one had no faith in Allah. This was widely reported in the Pakistani press and ridiculed. Meanwhile I received bad news from my sister Aleema. who was managing the hospital's marketing campaign. Fundraising had virtually collapsed because of the team's poor performance and the press had made me the scapegoat. Nevertheless I told her to prepare for a renewed campaign once we came home with the cup. Unfortunately she did not take this suggestion seriously either and nothing had been prepared when we returned to Pakistan victorious. My complete belief that we would win boosted the team's confidence and helped prevent it from falling apart. At times of crisis the entire team will look to the captain, but they do not so much pay attention to what he says as to whether he believes in what he is saying. They watch his body language rather than listen to his speeches. My conviction gave me the right body language. It helped too that in the previous three years we had won many times from impossible situations. (In 1989, we had won the Nehru Cup in India, after being on the brink of elimination mid­ way through the competition. We won the final in Calcutta in front of 100,000 Indians who were egging on the West Indians to win.) We were also lucky in the World Cup when on two occasions rain was forecast while we were batting second. It only had to rain on one of those occasions for ten minutes and it would have been all over for us. In that tournament the laws were such that a team batting second had no chance of winning if the match was interrupted by rain. In the semi-final in Auckland, the clouds came but it did not rain. From the mid-way point we came from behind and went on to win. Twenty minutes after the match finished it started to rain, and it rained for the next 24 hours. 

My love affair with cricket had been over since 1987; after that I had played only for the hospital. So happy was I for this dream of mine that at the presentation ceremony after the game, I forgot to thank the team for their brilliant performance. I was criticized for it and I must confess the speech was terrible; thinking about it still makes me cringe. But quite frankly I had other things on my mind than making a speech. It also has to be said that I was the kind of person who had trouble speaking to a small room of people and suddenly a microphone was thrust in my face without warning and I was expected to address a crowd of 90,000 people and hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world. 

However, something bizarre happened after the World Cup. For some reason several players in my team began to think that the money the ecstatic Pakistani public would shower on them for winning the tournament would somehow be diverted by me to the cancer hospital. I am still puzzled about how they came to this conclusion. When we stopped in Singapore on the way home from Australia, the Pakistani ambassador presented me with some money for the hospital. I guess that might have sparked off this idea, and that the team might have thought this money should go to them. Then when we returned to Pakistan, the traders of Lahore threw a function in the city's Shalimar Gardens in our honour. In the beautiful setting of the formal gardens, built by the Mughal emperor in the mid-seventeenth century, they announced they too had raised some contributions for the hospital. To my amazement the rest of the team walked out of the party in protest. I had had several great shocks in my life by that point: my mother's death; hearing about the massacres in East Pakistan from Ashraful Haque; breaking my leg at the peak of my career. But learning that players I had hand-picked and nurtured could think I would divert their winnings took me by complete surprise. It disappointed me intensely. Awards were always divided up evenly. If you were 'Man of the Match', the winnings were shared amongst the team - for ten or eleven years I had been 'Man of the Series' almost every series and I had always shared everything. Most of the team were later to apologize for their behaviour; a few of them said they had been misled and they all blamed each other. I can't help feeling that the seeds of greed were sown after the 1992 World Cup. Altogether the winnings were 90,000 pounds each. No Pakistani cricketers had ever made so much money. The team that I left in 1992 was the best team in world cricket and should have dominated the sport for the next decade, and they were the favourites to win the next two World Cups of 1996 and 1999 but that team never lived up to its potential. From 1993 this great team was dogged by match-fixing allegations. culminating in the ultimate disgrace of sport-fixing in 2010. 

The three tours where I was tested the most as a captain were India in 1987. the West Indies in 1988 and the 1992 World Cup. India was hard because the tour was played there. with Indian umpires. with a Pakistan team on paper inferior to the Indians especially under home conditions; losing to India. as far as the people of Pakistan were concerned. was not an option. When the two play it ceases to be a game and turns into a highly pressurized contest. putting the sort of pressure on players that they don' t feel in any other series. When we had lost in India in 1979. our captain was a broken man and retired from cricket. In the West Indies in 1988. we were facing one of the greatest teams in history; one sign of weakness and we would have collapsed. To go to their home ground. to play against them with home umpires. and to come away with a draw was my greatest triumph. No team had achieved that in the past decade. And the 1992 World Cup matches were completely about holding your nerve. Captaining the team developed in me the ability to take pressure. to hold my nerve in a crisis. and nowhere could I have had such training as on the cricket field. It was to prove immensely valuable to me later in my life. 

(It was the same when I set up the political party. or took on building the cancer hospital; they needed leadership. the hospital project lurched from crisis to crisis. and the party has been in opposition for fifteen years - no other Pakistani party has done so and survived.) 

I was under pressure from the British Pakistani community to tour England a month after the World Cup and they were promising to raise huge funds for the hospital. I was considering it. even though by this stage I had played twenty-one years of international cricket and was desperate to move on. Mercifully. the players' walkout in Shalimar Gardens made it easier for me to make the decision and I finally cut my links with the sport. closing that chapter of my life. I moved on quickly. plunging myself into my next great challenge. The hospital now needed all my time. I donated my entire prize money to the project and the win gave the fundraising efforts a huge boost. I was able to collect 140 million rupees during the six weeks after the World Cup. whereas in the first one and a half years of campaigning we had collected only 10 million rupees. It was not till 1994 that I had to worry about cash flow for the project again. 

My cricket career might have been over. but politics was still beckoning. In the summer of 1993. I was asked to be a cabinet minister in the caretaker government of Moeen Qureshi that had been formed following the dismissal of Nawaz Sharif's government by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. Qureshi himself called me. Again I declined. However. by now I was thinking about how I could make some kind of political contribution. At this point most Pakistanis were pretty concerned at the rapid downward slide of the country caused by the avarice and sheer incompetence of our politicians. Both Bhutto and Sharif had been in power once each and it had become blatantly obvious that their predominant interest was in amassing personal wealth and holding on to office by stifling opposition through any means. Neither had any vision for the country. as clearly manifested by their total lack of interest in investing in human capital. In real terms. spending on education and health nosedived during their eleven years of government despite the fact that. as the Asian Tiger economies have proved. both sectors always go hand in hand with development. At this stage. however. I felt that politics was not suited to either my introverted temperament or my very private way of life. Therefore rather than think of coming into politics myself I began to look for people I could support who would be an alternative to Sharif and Benazir. During this period I also started meeting a lot of politically minded people. and held endless discussions on the state of the nation. This was the first time in my life that I had met people outside my small circle of friends and cricketing circles.

'Angels in Disguise': Building a Hospital, 1984-1995 

SPORT IS RUTHLESS. before my mother's death, I was never a compassionate person. In cricket, if you do not crush your opponent, he will crush you. I gave no quarter and asked for none. You cannot become one of the top sportsmen in your country without having a ruthless killer instinct. I had the same mindset when I dealt with the underprivileged in our society. Rather than having my pity, they had my contempt. They were poor because they were indolent and unwilling to work hard. Most of our elite classes have this attitude towards the poor, and Western governments have this attitude towards the developing world. My experience founding a hospital overturned these views, teaching me a great deal about both my fellow countrymen and myself. I saw the true potential of ordinary Pakistani people and overcame not just my own prejudices, but also some of my own insecurities. With this, I was drawing closer still to the idea of trying to help Pakistan politically. Besides, in challenging the status quo, and trying to fill a social security void left by a succession of Pakistani leaders, I found myself dragged into politics whether I liked it or not. 

When, in 1984, my mother was suffering during the last few weeks of her life, I went to see a doctor in Lahore's Mayo hospital (where I was born) to seek his advice. I was sitting in his waiting room when an old man walked in with a desperate expression on his face. It was etched with pain that I immediately recognized as my own, and had seen on the faces of my father and my sisters for past few months. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand and some medicines in the other. Being unable to read, he gave it to the doctor's assistant and asked him if he had bought all the medication that was needed. The assistant told him there was one missing. 'How much will it cost?' asked the old man. When the assistant quoted the figure a despairing and hopeless expression spread across the man's face, and without another word, he turned and walked out. I asked the assistant what the problem was. He told me that this old Pashtun from Nowshera, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, had brought in his brother who was dying of cancer. Because there was no bed for the sick man he was lying in the corridor. This man would labour all day on a construction site nearby and look after his brother for the rest of the time. Although the government-run Mayo hospital is supposed to be free, patients have to buy their own medicines. 

Having taken my mother for cancer treatment in London, I fully realized how expensive cancer drugs were. Even the cost of the morphine-based painkillers - if they were available at all - was exorbitant. Moreover, cancer treatment could last anything between six months to two years. Now it is possible to die of cancer pain-free, but at the time there was no concept of pain management in Pakistan. Here was I with all my resources and influence, yet I and my family were in such a desperate state - what must this poor man have been going through? I pondered over this during the rest of my mother's illness, and that old Pashtun's despairing face kept appearing before my eyes. One of the first things that had struck me when I took my mother for medical care in England was that she was suffering from what should have been a curable cancer - if it had been diagnosed and treated early enough. It pained me too that we had had to take her out of the country for treatment. Anyone who has been through this experience will understand what an ordeal this is for patients and their loved ones, irrespective of their wealth. Being abroad and far from your family support system - sometimes for months at a time - makes a hard situation harder still. It was then that I resolved to build a cancer hospital where anyone could walk in without having to worry about the cost of treatment and with the rich not having to seek treatment abroad. 

However, at this stage I had no idea what it took to build a specialist cancer hospital. let alone in an underdeveloped country. As I began to make enquiries, I discovered that the government of Punjab had tried to build a cancer hospital in the 1980s. Despite all the money that was allocated to it, the plan was eventually abandoned because it was deemed un feasible - too expensive to build and even more expensive to run. Besides, there were only two to three oncologists in the entire country and they would be reluctant to accept paltry government salaries. A cancer hospital also needed the most expensive equipment. Pakistan did not have enough qualified engineers to fix this equipment if anything went wrong. 

For a while I was too busy with my cricket to give the idea any more attention. However, after 1987, I again began to ponder how to go about getting the project off the ground. The more people - especially doctors - that I spoke to, the more they discouraged me. I was having serious doubts at this stage and it is possible that I would have kept postponing the project, when in 1988 a cousin of mine, Qamar Khan, organized a fundraising dinner while I was playing a cricket tournament in Dubai. This was our first one and we collected about $20,000. After that there was no turning back. When I returned to Pakistan I gathered a few people together and formed a trust and a board of governors. Parvez Hassan, a lawyer with a strong background in working for charities, and entrepreneur Razzak Dawood joined the initiative and were to become completely involved. My friends Ashiq Qureshi and Azmat Ali Khan (who tragically later passed away from cancer in the hospital) also came on board. Babar Ali, a well­ known businessman from an old Lahore family, lent his name to the project, as did the future finance minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Tarin. My father became chairman of the board. 

Then we organized a meeting with twenty of the top doctors in Lahore to guide the board of governors of this trust on how to proceed further. All bar one of these doctors said the project was simply not feasible in Pakistan. One said that it was, but there was no way we would be able to treat the poor for free, the average cost of treating a cancer patient was too high. We were totally demoralized after the meeting. I had no idea how to deal with the situation. I could not get out of the project because not only had I publicly announced it but much more significantly I had already started to collect money. My cousin, the cricketer Javed Burki, suggested I just build a big dispensary in my mother's name and give up on the hospital ideal. My sisters, who were worried about me, suggested I should drop the plan or I would lose all the respect and credibility I had gained from my cricketing career. But it was too late. Even if I wanted to I could not. How could I return people's donations? Just as I was getting desperate, an encouraging meeting with the Pakistani Association of North American doctors spurred me on. Their promise of help encouraged me to cut down on my cricket commitments so I could concentrate on the project. I set up an office given to me for free by a friend, Omar Farooq, and hired our first employee. 

Initially I did not work on the hospital out of the kind of passion I had once had for cricket. I had decided to build it for the poor, but my motivation was not out of any great feeling of responsibility towards society. It felt more like an obligation or a mission and stemmed from immense personal pain and the memory of that vulnerable moment seeing the old Pashtun in the doctor's waiting room. I was motivated too by the feeling that had there been a specialized cancer hospital in Pakistan, my mother could have been saved. My sense of charity was still limited though. My mother used to take a percentage of my cricket earnings each year to give zakat to the poor but after she died 1 stopped. 1 had lost a lot of money after putting all my savings in shares just before the world stock markets crashed in 1987. By this stage my spiritual journey had started and 1 could not help wondering if 1 had been punished in some way because 1 had not cleansed my money by giving zakat. 1 still did not give out of conviction, though; that was to come later, after 1 saw the generosity of the common man in Pakistan and my faith had developed to the point where 1 realized charity is not an option, it is a duty. The more people ridiculed the hospital project and told me it could never be done, the more determined 1 was to prove them wrong. This was one of the characteristics that had helped me in cricket. (I was dropped after my first test for Pakistan, and most of the players ridiculed my cricket, saying that 1 had made my first and last appearance for my country.) But it was a huge burden. 1 was told the hospital would be a white elephant. Others said 1 should focus on building a facility for primary care, saying a cancer hospital was too ambitious. But 1 was doing this because of the death of my mother, which had made me realize there was no cancer hospital in Pakistan. 'What will happen to poor people with cancer?' 1 would ask. 'They will die anyway,' was their reply. 

One day, somebody from my social circle accused me in front of some friends of doing it all for publicity, just as celebrities endorse charities to get their names in the papers. 1 nearly hit him. His sneering was typical of certain sections of Pakistan's elite. They are completely decadent and utterly cynical. Desperately envious of anyone who has succeeded in the West, they are keen to drag you down to their level if you so much as aspire to help the country. The only other time 1 truly lost my cool in the face of detractors was in England. 1 met with a group of British Pakistani doctors at Shazan restaurant in Knightsbridge and they started to ask me a lot of technical questions about how the hospital would work. One of them in particular ridiculed the whole plan. He badgered me on technical points, as if to taunt me with my lack of medical knowledge. He told me this was not my field, that 1 would fail and ruin the great reputation 1 had made from my cricketing career. 1 almost left the dinner, so furious was I. The problem was that 1 was consulting all these doctors, but doctors, like most technocrats, are enslaved by logic. They are concerned with practicalities, whilst 1 was always a dreamer and my struggle in cricket had taught me to believe that nothing was impossible if one never gave up. They were realists whereas 1 was and always have been an idealist. 

However, the concept of the hospital was still not clear at this stage. We had a volunteer doctor who was helping us but unfortunately she did not have the experience to undertake such a huge project. Our big break was still to come. 1 was in New York for a festival cricket match when 1 happened to meet a Pakistani cancer specialist called Dr Tauseef Ahmed at a dinner party. 1 told him of the project's difficulties. He responded by saying that there was only one Pakistani doctor he knew who had the capability of handling such a massive undertaking. The man in question happened to be none other than my first cousin Dr Nausherwan Burki - my mother's favourite nephew. It was Nausherwan who took on the entire medical side of the project, while 1 began to concentrate on the fundraising. A huge burden was lifted from my shoulders. Although there were a lot of people who played a heroic role in building the hospital, 1 have no doubt that Nausherwan was the most crucial. Had 1 not met him at that point in time, 1 would still be groping in the dark. At his first presentation to the board we all heaved a huge sigh of relief - here finally was somebody who really knew what they were doing. He gave us the confidence that this dream could one day become a reality. Nausherwan was no ordinary doctor. Not only is he an outstanding pulmonologist but his brilliant mind was always curious about every aspect of the health system. This was the perfect challenge for him. From the United States, where he was a professor at Kentucky University hospital, he planned every aspect of the project - from selecting the architects. hiring the medical staff and (using his contacts in Kentucky) getting the best­ quality equipment at the best prices. 

Although my quest for God had begun after my mother passed away. I was still leading a self-centred way of life. However. my faith and the hospital grew together. The hospital tested my belief in God to the limit and all the time kept strengthening it. In turn. my growing faith helped the hospital. It was a symbiotic relationship. The project removed all doubts within me that were it not for the will of God. it would have failed due to the many blunders made by me and my well-meaning but inexperienced team. So many times the situation appeared hopeless. yet somehow things would work out. When the hospital opened after a record construction time of three and a quarter years. rather than feel arrogant and brag about it. I felt totally humble. 

Another great lesson in building the hospital was overcoming my pride and bringing my ego under control. Ever since I can remember I have always wanted to be self-contained. and hated to ask anyone for anything. I would feel a loss of dignity even asking my father for money (whereas Pakistanis often have no problem accepting money from their parents). When I announced the hospital project and the expected funds did not come. I was left with no option but to go out and ask for money. This was harder than anything I had ever done. I just cannot express how humiliating I found it to be kept waiting by certain businessmen who knew I had come to ask for funds. There were some who deliberately wanted to put me in my place. as they thought I was arrogant. As a sought-after cricket star I would pick and choose from the many invitations I received. I often turned down those from people who had made a lot of money and wanted to use their new-found wealth to rub shoulders with the famous. Now I had to turn to these people for donations. The media also tried to settle old scores. As a cricketer the press had needed me and I had been able to be selective about which journalists I talked to. If one wrote anything nasty about me. I would simply cut them off. Now I had to court them. so that they would highlight my project and help me raise funds. One bad article could mean the loss of huge amounts of donations. So I badly needed their goodwill. For the sake of the cause I really had to grovel to certain journalists and I found it simply excruciating. 

I also changed towards children. Ever since I became a successful cricketer. my biggest followers were kids. There was. however. one problem - I just did not know how to behave with them. I was one of those adults who felt totally ill at ease with them. Whenever I was at home in Lahore. people would bring their children to meet me. Most of the time I would be so awkward about having to face yet another horde of them that I would tell my sisters to say I was not at home. My poor mother (who loved children) would be furious and force me to see them. All this changed. After one and a half years of fundraising. I ran out of steam in 1990. What I have learned from running a charity is that if you have to raise a hundred rupees. the first ten are the hardest and the last ten are the easiest. I had kept going back to the same people for funds and they simply did not want to hear any more about the hospital. There was terrible donor fatigue and it seemed that I had reached a dead end. We could not start the construction of the hospital without substantial funds. At this juncture a friend suggested that since children were my greatest fans. I should go to the schools and ask them to collect funds for me. which horrified me. However. my sister Aleema. who had joined me in my mission. caught on to the idea. Within a month she had designed a whole fundraising campaign based on the children of Pakistan. It meant me going to schools all over the country. addressing them and inviting them to be in my fundraising team. which we named Imran's Tigers. Only those who were close to me would know how totally opposed to my nature this was. I worried that I would make a fool of myself and the children would make fun of me. 

I can never forget my first day addressing a school assembly in Lahore. Tense when I set out. I almost came to blows with another driver in my worst case of road­ rage. Drenched in sweat. I was so shy and awkward that a lot of the children began to giggle. We started campaigning at private schools but soon the state schools were also clamouring to join in. For two months I went to between five and six schools a day addressing their assemblies and explaining to them why it was important to have a cancer hospital in Pakistan. Each time before facing an assembly I had to muster all my courage to speak to them. Initially it was more terrifying than facing fast bowlers in front of a packed stadium. However. what happened as a result of my campaign was a sort of a mini-revolution in the country. The schoolchildren created history. never had there been such a successful fundraising campaign in the history of Pakistan. The children pestered their parents. uncles and aunts for money. They stopped motorists at traffic lights. and collected funds from door to door. Any child that collected over a certain amount of money would win a cricket bat signed by me. In a society like Pakistan where the family system is strong and children are adored I found we had hit upon the best possible way to collect money. I would be eating in a restaurant and the moment children spotted me. they would ask their parents for money and then hand me their donations. Unlike in the UK or the United States. in Pakistan children go everywhere - restaurants. functions. marriages - because all life revolves around the family. Not only was a huge amount of money collected. but more significantly the children themselves made everyone in the country aware of the fact that in a population of what was then 140 million people there was no cancer hospital. The campaign succeeded beyond my wildest imagination and enabled us to start construction. Today I meet Pakistani professionals all over the world who proudly tell me that they participated in my school fundraising campaign. 

At the end of the campaign my inhibitions in dealing with children had disappeared and I felt really privileged that they looked up to me. Moreover I began to give more and more of what I had to the hospital. I had not been raised to be extravagant. My parents were always careful with their money and had brought me and my sisters up with an awareness that since there was so much poverty around we should never be wasteful and should give any extra money or food to the poor. My father had founded a charity called the Pakistan Educational Society. which funded the university education of underprivileged but talented children. He made me a member of the board when I was twenty-two. However. while previously I found it hard to give. and when I did give I felt I was doing the recipient a huge favour. now I gave out of a sense of duty and would feel satisfaction afterwards. From then on I would identify my needs. work out exactly what my expenses were for the year and whatever I made in excess of that I would give to the hospital. (Now. I also donate to the university I have founded in Mianwali.) I began to realize that once this exercise is done. it becomes fairly easy to start giving. Life became simpler and I ceased worrying about my earnings. I would never run out of money as an opportunity would always come up and I would make enough to keep me going. By the time the hospital opened in December 1994. I had given almost half of what I owned to the hospital. 

The project lurched from one crisis to another. We had found a 20-acre plot outside Lahore and ground was broken in April 1991. With barely 10 million rupees in the bank we were embarking on a 700-million-rupee project. No wonder everyone was sceptical. You could never start a commercial project with that kind of financing. The problems were never-ending - hiring people. construction delays. equipment issues and a constant struggle to meet costs. Every time we feared we would have to halt the project because of a lack of funds somebody would always appear at the last minute with a donation. Even our first chief executive. an American by the name of David Wood. said our goal to provide 75-80 per cent free or financially assisted treatment was impossible. Backing up his argument with a Powerpoint presentation. he told the board that if we treated more than 5 per cent of the patients for free the hospital would close down within a few months. No other private cancer hospital in the world had managed what we were trying to achieve. But I had specifically promised people free treatment for the poor. And this was something many of our more impoverished donors held me to. 'Will it really be free for the poor?' they would ask. wary after a lifetime of being let down by the rulers and elite of Pakistan. The board and I refused to compromise on our objective. Not only was the hospital going to provide the proposed amount of free treatment. it had to be state of the art. and it had to be a research centre. I had no idea at this stage how to finance the free treatment. We overruled Wood. 

The surge in donations and goodwill during the post-World Cup euphoria sustained us for a while but by 1994 the situation was coming to a head. It was a real uphill battle because we kept running out of funds and I had to constantly travel to tap overseas Pakistanis for help. In 1994 I toured New Zealand. Australia. Singapore. the UK. Norway. Germany. Denmark. Holland. the United States. Canada. the UAE. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Wherever in the world there was a Pakistani community. I was there asking them for money. By the summer of that year donor fatigue had got to the point where rich donors would hide if they saw me. This was when the real money was needed; construction had to be completed. staff had to be hired. down-payments for equipment had to be made. To make matters worse. I got unnecessarily involved in a ball-tampering controversy in June 1994. which made fund collection even more difficult. The two great Pakistani fast bowlers Wasim Akram and Wakar Younis. who had been nurtured and groomed by me and whose success I took great pride in. had decimated England back in 1992. Sadly. some English cricketers and British tabloids blamed their supreme ability in reverse swinging on ball tampering. I could not bear to see such unfair treatment of two great fast bowlers. I gave an interview to a biographer about reverse swing and ball tampering and got sucked into a controversy that ended up with me being taken to court a couple of years later by former English captain and all­ rounder Ian Botham and batsman Allan Lamb. The controversy and the furore that followed inevitably hurt the fundraising campaign. 

We had aimed to open in the summer of 1994 but by the spring the building contractor said we' d have to wait another year. The opening could be no later than December. It really had to open then because in 1995 Ramadan was in February and March; Ramadan is when Muslims make their biggest donations to charity and we needed that money in order to offer free treatment once the hospital opened. Not only that. but if we had to wait another year. till Ramadan 1996. we would have had to bear the cost of a medical and administrative staff. all of which would have been on our payroll by then for over fourteen months. Relief arrived in yet another minor miracle: a new building contractor. T.M. Khan was an extraordinary man. He asked to have all the powers he needed and to be left alone to do the job. He succeeded against all odds. 

But by October we still needed 4 million dollars to open the hospital and had run out of steam again. We were brain-storming one day when I pointed out that many ordinary Pakistanis often came up to me to give me small donations of 1.000 rupees or so. The will to give was there. but how could we harness it? Our adviser and my friend. Tahir Ali Khan. Pakistan' s most brilliant marketing expert. suggested I should simply go round Pakistan with a donation box. appealing to the public for funds. Despite scepticism amongst the marketing team. he came up with a plan for a nationwide fundraising trip. First of all we had a trial run. On 5 October we set off with an open truck and a collecting box to the town of Daska. in central Punjab. We had put posters up around the town to advertise my arrival and within a couple of hours had collected about 500.000 rupees. On the back of that we prepared a whole campaign tour of twenty-nine cities. large and small. running from mid-November to 28 December. I would address school assemblies from seven in the morning up until about lunchtime, when I would hit the streets. Meanwhile, an advance team would go out and speak to the traders' organizations, groups that were to become my biggest fundraisers along with the school kids. 

What followed was not just an eye-opener for me but a revelation to the people of Pakistan of their own potential. It was during this campaign that I started thinking more about going into politics. I was absolutely stunned by the generosity of ordinary Pakistanis. We did not have to provide entertainment for them as we did with our big fundraising dinners for the rich, but whatever people had, they gave me. Donors flooded to the open jeep where I sat next to the collection box, giving so generously that it left me bewildered. Men would hand over their watches and women throw down their necklaces and earrings from the windows of their houses. I would get back to where I was staying around midnight - usually after a fundraising dinner. At the hotel there would be more people waiting to hand me donations. Sometimes villages would call me urging me to come and collect the money they had raised. Before embarking on the tour, I had met the editors of all the main newspapers to tell them about the project and request their support. Bar one English-language daily, I must say all the papers were extremely cooperative, turning it into a competition by publicizing how much each town raised. After an exhausting six weeks we had collected 5 million dollars from the ordinary people of Pakistan. 

I was quite perplexed to see poor people donating such a high proportion of their income to the project - especially given that it was a cancer hospital and was not going to be in their town. So I would ask them why they were giving. It was always the same reply, 'I am not doing you a favour. I am doing it to invest in my Hereafter.' This had a profound effect on me. I developed a love and respect for the people that I must confess I did not have before. One incident in particular touched and inspired me. I had just arrived home in Lahore, my whole body aching from a twelve-hour day of collecting cash, when some people arrived at the door. They said they had raised some money for the hospital and wanted me to come and collect it. I could see that they were poor and told them not to worry, that we could manage without their contributions. But they insisted and refused to leave, begging me to go with them. So I climbed into their Toyota, so battered it was barely capable of making the short journey to Shao ki Garhi, a neighbourhood near Zaman Park. There they led me down streets that reeked with the smell of open sewers, me cursing them under my breath, until we reached a small mosque. To my annoyance the money had not even been collected yet. A man used the mosque loudspeaker to announce my arrival and urged people to come and donate. I was so tired and angry I almost hit one of the men who had taken me there, but before I could storm off the locals started to come. The mosque was suddenly filled with people, the poorest of the poor, each offering me five rupees, ten rupees, fifteen rupees. My anger left me, I was genuinely moved and had to hold back my tears. I said I didn't want to take their money but they insisted, maintaining they had a right to participate in the campaign and saying they were doing it for the afterlife. Many told me their stories of pain and loss, of loved ones who had suffered and died for lack of medical help. One woman recounted how her son had passed away in a hospital waiting room. The only promise I had to make before I left was that hospital treament would be free for the poor. 

It proved to me that generosity has a lot to do with faith and nothing at all to do with one's bank balance. There is all this debate amongst the media, the politicians and the intelligentsia in Pakistan about the extent to which the state should be based on Islam. And yet the common man in Pakistan lives by his religion, day in day out. It doesn't make him a saint but it produces certain qualities, one of which is a belief in the need to give now in order to receive in the afterlife. I started thinking that such people were capable of great sacrifices. Could these people not be mobilized to fight to save our ever-deteriorating country? Surely if there was a sincere government that genuinely wanted to eradicate poverty and injustice in our society, people would mobilize behind it - Pakistan would not then have to grovel in front of other countries and the IMF and World Bank for loans and alms every few months. 

When I discussed this with the late Dr Ashfaq Ahmed, one of Pakistan's leading intellectuals, he told me about a meeting he once had with Chairman Mao in the 1960s. When Mao heard that Dr Ashfaq was from Pakistan, he said, 'Your people have tremendous potential. ' Mao had been impressed by a story told to him by a Chinese ambassador to Pakistan. The diplomat had been playing chess with his Pakistani chess partner, who was fasting in the blistering heat of a Karachi summer. The poor Pakistani was suffering badly, and every few minutes he would pour some water on his head before making his move on the chessboard. When the Chinese ambassador asked him why he didn't just have a sip of water in private, his friend was indignant and replied, 'How can you fool God?' From that Mao decided that any people capable of such will­ power and self-control must be capable of great things - it was just that the nation hadn't tapped that strength yet. 

It was in building this hospital that, as well as discovering the generosity of the man in the street, I discovered how hard it was to achieve anything in Pakistan while also battling bureaucracy and corruption. The night before the official opening of the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Centre on 29 December 1994, fifty thousand people came out in the cold to celebrate in Lahore's Fortress Stadium. The next day ten-year-old cancer patient Sumera cut the ribbon in what was the most fulfilling moment of my life. Benazir and Zardari had not forgiven me, however, for snubbing their offer to do the honours. The state-controlled television and radio that up till then had given good support to the project suddenly blanked out both me and the hospital. making it harder to collect donations. Raising the 22 million dollars it took to build the hospital was the first hurdle, but we now needed additional funds for free treatment. The government-paid journalists launched a vicious campaign against me in the papers. Worse, barely a month after the hospital opened, I was hauled up in Lahore High Court and accused of embezzling people's donations. It was no coincidence that the court case coincided with the zakat campaign launched during the month of fasting to raise funds. The plan was quite obvious. If we treated the poor for free before we had enough money then the hospital would go bankrupt. If we did not do so then quite rightly I would be exposed by the government media as a fraud. In a country where the people have been taken for a ride so many times and are so cynical about everyone, they would have believed the worst about me. 

Luckily, the case against me collapsed immediately. Our hospital had watertight financial controls and total transparency; our accounts were audited by one of the most prestigious firms in the country. Moreover, I happened to be the biggest donor to the hospital at the time. Benazir's government had not realized that. Also, fortunately for me, the people did not trust the government. They were aware that because it felt threatened by me it was trying to victimize me. Benazir's government was extremely unpopular by that point and lacked credibility. So here I was already in politics, without actually being in politics. I began to be treated as a political opponent, and a political opponent in Pakistan - whether in a democracy or military dictatorship - gets a rough deal. The entire state machinery turns against you. And in Pakistan, like in most of the developing world, the state is everywhere. My phones were tapped and wherever I went I was followed by a car. Everyone in the government was petrified to befriend me out of fear of losing their jobs. And since we have a big government, one has to deal with government officials all the time. 

I was left with two choices: either Ijoined Nawaz Sharif and got the protection of his party or I had to go to Benazir's royal court in Islamabad and beg forgiveness for not inviting her to the hospital opening and convince her that I was not setting myself up as a political rival. My friend Yousaf Salahuddin, who was close to Benazir and Zardari, advised me to follow the latter course, He warned that otherwise Zardari would destroy the hospital. He offered to mediate, While Yousaf's suggestion was logical, it had the opposite effect. I went on an all-out attack in the press with both guns blazing at the governing couple's corruption. This had a far greater impact on the public than attacks from Sharif's party. Since Sharif was considered equally corrupt, his accusations against Benazir and her husband rang hollow. Especially since Benazir would immediately list the corruption charges against Sharif and his family. Now, for the first time, corruption became the number-one issue on the national agenda. 

Despite the setbacks, we managed to treat 90 per cent of our patients for free that first year. We became pioneers in inventing and innovating fundraising techniques; today many charities have been inspired by and follow our fundraising model. There were other challenges to come though. Equipment would get stuck at customs, we would refuse to pay the bribes necessary to get it released and I would have to pull strings. The World Bank awarded us a $1 million grant for a waste-disposal incinerator but then withdrew the offer because Nawaz Sharif's government, which followed Benazir's, insisted it went to another hospital. A charity headed by the Argentinian president Carlos Menem offered to give the hospital a shipment of cancer drugs for free - all we needed was a letter from Rafik Tarar, Sharif's puppet president. He refused and the hospital lost the donation. Most shocking of all, though, was the bomb attack on the hospital in 1996, just a few weeks after I started to talk publicly about forming a political movement. Seven people died, including two child patients, thirty-five were injured and millions of rupees of damage caused. The device, planted under a chair in the waiting hall, destroyed the outpatient and endoscopy departments. If the building had not had such large windows the whole roof would have come down. I should have been there at the time to show the businessman Nasim Saigol around but he had cancelled just as I was about to leave home. I don't think I was the target of the bomb, but the innocent lives lost and the destruction caused both saddened and made me even more determined to succeed in my new endeavour. The pressure this incident brought was something I could deal with; I repeated the system that had worked for me in cricket, I blocked out thoughts of failure, and instead focused on what I had to do to succeed. 

With so many obstacles, if it had been a commercial enterprise it would have closed down, but instead it went from strength to strength to become the biggest charitable institution in Pakistan. In the end, the hospital's success was its best protection. Its work has garnered so much goodwill. It continues to treat a minimum of 65 per cent of patients for free with another 10 per cent paying a fraction of their costs. And it was still the only cancer hospital in the country - for rich or poor. Sooner or later even the opinion-makers would end up there, some for treatment, others to visit friends or relatives. So it became harder and harder for any propaganda against the institution to succeed. Everybody is treated equally, so that even the doctors do not know the difference between paying and non-paying patients. Rich and poor wait side by side in the waiting room and lie side by side in their sick beds. There is no special treatment, no queue barging, no taking precedence. All of this is rare in a country like Pakistan where the rich and powerful are accustomed to VIP treatment. Today the hospital generates enough money to more than cover its annual operating budget of 3.6 billion rupees. Over half its revenues are now earned through the sale of hospital services with the rest coming from donations from all over the world. Visits by international celebrities ranging from Bollywood heart-throb Aamir Khan to Princess Diana and Elizabeth Hurley have helped raise money too. In 2006 the hospital won the World Health Organization's UAE Foundation Prize for 'Outstanding work in health development'. It has treated more than 84,000 people, including myself. I had an emergency operation there in 2009 and my father spent the last two and a half months of his life there in 2008. Similar hospitals are planned for Karachi and Peshawar and we are already running outreach cancer-screening clinics in those two cities. Revenues from diagnostic centres in Lahore and Karachi and sixty-seven pathology collection centres all over Pakistan are helping the trust increase its self-sufficiency. As for the little girl who cut the opening ribbon back in 1994, Sumera is now one of the hospital's 1,500 staff and runs the gift-shop. Such is the reputation of the hospital today that politicians opposing me are petrified to attack it. 

On a personal level, the hospital has taught me so much. Most importantly, I learned how to build and run an institution; crucially, if the leadership follow the rules, so does everyone else. I had learned this as a cricket captain; to discipline the team all I had to do was to ensure that the senior players didn't break the rules - the juniors automatically fell into line. Secondly, more important than the competence of the CEO was his integrity and passion. Integrity was indispensable, as no matter how competent, a dishonest person could destroy the institution; I'd seen in cricket how passion lifted a less-talented player's game so that he could contribute more than a passionless talented one. 

I am proud to say that today the hospital is a model institution for the whole of Pakistan. Doctors and nurses come from hospitals all over the country to see how our systems work. Along with the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, it has raised medical standards across the board in Pakistan. 

I have also come to understand better the ordinary people of Pakistan, through the small miracles, the bigger tragedies and the simple faith of those I met in the hospital's wards. There I have seen how they deal with death, accepting it as the will of God. Most moving of all was a young boy from Swat I spotted one day when I was visiting the intensive care unit. He was covered in tubes but his face radiated defiance. Impressed by his fight to stay alive, I became caught up in his case, meeting with his father and regularly checking with the doctors on his progress. By that time my son Sulaiman had been born and becoming a father wrought the biggest change on me in my life. It suddenly made me understand how vulnerable we are as parents. So I could feel the torment this man was going through seeing his son fight this life and death struggle. Then one day I went to check up on the boy and was told he had died. I sought out the father, expecting to find him a broken man. Instead he was resigned to his loss, saying it was the will of Allah. I was amazed at how quickly he had come to terms with it. I myself was overwhelmed by the boy's death and couldn't face work that day. I went home. 

Mian Bashir became a regular visitor to my project office while we were building the hospital as it was near his house. He was a great source of help and encouragement - partially through his ability to occasionally foresee some pitfalls but mainly because of his great wisdom that never ceased to amaze me. One day we were having lunch in my office. I was feeling a little upset that the construction committee had not awarded the air-conditioning contract to the lowest bidder, who happened to be a friend of mine, Irshad Khan. During lunch Irshad called up furious, saying that there was something fishy going on as the contract had been awarded to a company that had left two projects unfinished and had a poor reputation in the industry. It made me feel even worse. Since he was my friend though I could not push his case as it would have been a conflict of interest. Without me telling him anything about the situation, Mian Bashir suddenly told me that the person who had been awarded the contract was in cahoots with one of the members of our construction committee and was not competent enough to finish the job. I was very concerned but Mian Bashir told me not to worry and that things would work out. Sure enough. a couple of months later that company was in financial trouble and the contract had to be re-awarded. It went to a highly competent competitor which thankfully finished the job on time.

My Marriage, 1995-2004 

WHEN I WAS leaving for England for the first time at the age of eighteen, my mother's last words to me were, 'Don't bring back an English wife.' She believed it would be impossible for a Western girl to adjust to our religion and culture. However, the decisions in my life have rarely been made through rationality and logic, more by impulse, to chase my dreams and my desires and passions. In both marriage, and my post-cricket career, I made somewhat unconventional choices for somebody of my background. Combining the outcome of those two decisions was to prove more difficult still. If marriage made me realize the happiness that comes from fatherhood and family life, politics taught me the price of taking on the status quo in Pakistan. This establishment is so venal that, unable to wield the usual weapon of corruption charges against me, they instead attacked me through my personal life, most particularly my wife. The thing to understand about Pakistani politics is that many politicians have so much to lose they will stop at nothing to gain or hold on to power. In terms of quality of life, political success is of no benefit to me, but for the likes of Zardari and Sharif, losing power might mean losing everything - their wealth, their homes, their status, their privileges and potentially their liberty - since many of them deserve to be in jail. Jemima and I were to discover how vicious this political mafia could be. 

It was many years after my mother's warning before I even started to contemplate marriage. At a certain point, my deepening spiritual belief made me realize that I could not reconcile the life I had been leading as a bachelor with Islam. This was the most difficult part; everything else - fasting, praying, giving zakat - was relatively easy. The reason it was so difficult was because I had lost faith in the institution of marriage. Growing up in Zaman Park I used to think getting married was the most natural thing in the world and assumed that, like my sisters and cousins, I would one day have an arranged marriage. But the older I grew, the more disillusioned I became. Most of the cricketers who played with me in English county cricket and on the Pakistani team found it difficult to make a success of their married lives. For most of them it seemed like a burden. Quite a few of them found the temptations that existed in the life of an international sportsman irresistible. Besides, most married men used to look at my life with envy. So it was hardly surprising that I was disillusioned. 

The only marriages I saw working were those of my sisters and cousins from my large extended family. Three of my four sisters were married and all had arranged marriages from within the large extended family. This was always the case with Pashtun tribes that had settled in Punjab or other parts of India. All three to varying degrees had their ups and downs with their husbands - especially in the early days when readjustment naturally takes place. Couples in arranged marriages face the same problems as those who have chosen their own partners, although expectations in arranged marriages tend to be somewhat lower. The crucial difference is that since it is a coming together of families, separation becomes difficult and divorce rare. The respective families - mainly the parents - act as marriage counsellors during the bad times. It is considered a good deed in Islam if someone can help a couple to sort out their troubled marriage. 

In Pakistan most marriages are arranged. Parents choosing a husband for their daughter will look at the candidate's financial stability, his family's reputation and compatibility in terms of personality. In most cases a son or daughter can decline their parents' suggestions but it varies from region to region and class to class. In the north and north-west of Pakistan young people are not given a lot of choice, especially girls, whilst the children of the urban elite play a bigger role in choosing their own partners. In villages girls and boys grow up together and often know each other, so most of the matches are easy for parents to arrange. Problems arise when there is no eligible boy or girl in the village. Then a spouse will be found from further afield and it is quite possible that the couple will meet for the first time on their wedding day. Traditional families will most likely know a groom's entire background. Parents would not allow their daughters to marry someone who could not be pressurized through his family to keep the marriage going during rough patches. Marriage not only knits families together but the entire social life revolves around the extended family structure. The more powerful the family is, the harder it is to divorce a person belonging to that family. Some of the worst problems in arranged marriages arise where parents marry their children off to a certain family because of their financial status, regardless of whether the couple is compatible or not. 

Whatever the problems, the underlying idea behind arranged marriage is that sacrifices must be made for the sake of the children. Over the years I have seen a lot of unhappy arranged marriages where couples have stuck it out for the sake of their offspring and their respective families. Women, who can be more vulnerable in our society, sometimes put up with mistreatment from their husbands just for the security of their children. However, there are of course lots of cases of men having to put up with difficult marriages too. Mian Bashir looked after his wife, who had fits of madness, for fourteen years. Doctors advised him to put her in an asylum but given the state of our mental health institutions he could not bear to do so. When she had her fits, she could be violent and his face bore the scars of that violence. 

Whatever the ups and downs of their marriages, I could see that my sisters took great joy in their children. There was a time when they and their families lived with my father and me. Instead of being an imposition, it was wonderful - especially for my father. All their children grew up like one family in the same house and the three sisters treated all of them as if they were their own offspring. It was this that began to change my mind about marriage. I used to notice how their husbands would literally rush back home to be with their children. Even I began to spend more time at home so I could play with them. When any of my nephews and nieces did well at school, all of us, including the other children, considered it a family triumph. When two of my sisters moved into their own homes, the house felt empty. Fortunately they only moved a few hundred yards away and most evenings their children would still come round. 

Making the decision to get married was one thing, but finding a Pakistani wife was another. I had already passed my mid-thirties but most eligible girls were married off in their early twenties. In Pakistan unmarried girls often live quite a sheltered existence. A woman under twenty-five would be too young for me, with too little experience of life. I also had to bear in mind that my extended family was quite conservative about the way to go about finding a wife. I had to make a choice after meeting the girl and her parents over a couple of brief meetings. Usually what happens is that the mothers, along with the sisters, survey their social scene and, after a careful process of elimination, pick a few eligible candidates. Then during marriage festivities amongst the community the potential spouse is pointed out. If the boy and girl in question are both interested then more intimate meetings, like a tea appointment, are organized. As for most Pakistani families, our weddings were segregated. It was too awkward for me, in my position and at my age, to go to the women's section to look at eligible girls. This would have been quite acceptable if I were in my mid-twenties. but in my mid-thirties it was a terrifying prospect. At one point my father got fed up (like the rest of my family) and decided to take matters into his own hands. He arranged tea at a friend's house so that I could meet his friend' s daughter. I tried everything to get out of it but in the end. out of respect for my father and not wanting to embarrass him with a last-minute cancellation. I went along. The whole situation was horribly awkward for all concerned. When the girl came into the room I was so embarrassed I could not even look at her. Meanwhile her mother treated me as if I was a 25-year-old. rather than someone who was approaching middle age. I was even asked about my university days - again a question more apt for someone in their early to mid-twenties. The agony finally ended when my father and I begged to leave. On the way back he did not even bother to ask me what I thought of the girl. He realized how ridiculous the whole situation was - all he said was that since my mother had passed away he had simply tried to do his duty. We both laughed and I politely requested him not to make any more attempts to find me a bride. 

I was still so busy playing cricket during this period that I was never in Lahore long enough to make a concerted attempt to find a wife. However. once I retired I made more of an effort. The girls I tended to meet were the westernized ones but I could not see them fitting into my conservative family. My sisters had strong characters and were not likely to be very tolerant of someone who flaunted family tradition. The last thing I wanted was that my marriage should isolate me from my family. As for the ones who would have been compatible with my background. educated girls from conservative families. it was too much of a lottery. How could I at my age marry someone after a few conversations? The idea of going to more tea appointments like the one I had been to with my father simply terrified me. In the end I had to accept the fact that I was too old for an arranged marriage. 

I was still intent on marrying a Pakistani girl when by chance I met Jemima in London at a dinner organized by my Persian friend Sharia. I immediately found her attractive and intelligent and was particularly impressed by her strong value system and the fact that despite her young age she already had a spiritual curiosity. While I had previously met Jemima' s siblings and cousins. I did not meet her parents till just before we got married. I had worried that it would be impossible to convince them - not only because of our age difference but also because of Jemima having to live in Pakistan. I was amazed at how firmly both Lady Annabel and Jimmy Goldsmith stood behind Jemima's decision. Of course there were warnings about the problems of a cross­ cultural marriage - but neither was at all against Jemima' s conversion to Islam. I was amazed at their tolerance. especially given the prejudice against Islam in the West. When the news of our marriage broke in mid-May 1995. the media in both Pakistan and the UK went berserk. particularly over Jemima's conversion. There was no shortage of advice for her in the English media about how dreadful life would be in Pakistan. The tabloids' prejudices about Islam and Pakistan were fully apparent. Jemima was told she would not be allowed to drive a car and would be veiled from head to toe. 

The only positive aspect of this perplexing media coverage was that outraged Muslims put forward the Islamic point of view. something that was not often visible in the Western media. The gist of the advice given to her in the UK was that she was too young and innocent to realize that she was being lured away by an older man because of her wealth to a country where women were enslaved. I was not surprised that my motive for marriage was thought to be her money (that very accusation was put to Jinnah when he married his bride. twenty-four years younger than himself and a Parsi convert to Islam). After all. people with a materialistic mind set would think that. I felt this was extremely unfair to Jemima and failed to do justice to her intelligence and her attractive personality. It took great strength of character to cope with such unfriendly media exposure, all the more so because until then she had been almost entirely protected from this kind of intrusion. It was really tough on her and she coped most admirably. Though I did help Jemima by recommending books on Islam, I never tried to force my views on her. I remembered how hard my mother had tried to make me a practising Muslim; despite my great love for her, she had failed to convince me. It had been Mian Bashir who won me over with his gentle way of never asking me to do anything and allowing me to discover the truth myself. 

In Pakistan Jemima received a warm and gracious welcome. As long as they adapt their behaviour to local customs, foreigners have always been received with great hospitality in Pakistan. It is only since 9/11 and the CIA drone attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that antagonism towards Americans - and inevitably other Westerners - has crept in. There was an initial frostiness amongst certain sections of the westernized elite but once they got to know Jemima they were friendly. This wariness would have been because Jemima, as a Westerner, made some of them feel insecure because their sense of superiority in Pakistan stemmed from their considering themselves to be westernized. However, what was hardest for Jemima were the politically inspired media attacks on her. Even though I was not yet in politics, I was already regarded as a threat by the politicians because of great public appreciation for the cancer hospital. The government-sponsored media portrayed my marriage as an intricate plot by the Zionists to take over Pakistan through Jemima. It did not seem to matter that she was not actually Jewish. In fact she was baptized and confirmed as a Protestant. Her father Jimmy Goldsmith's father was Jewish and his mother was a French Catholic but he grew up in an atheist household. This campaign intensified when I announced my political party a year after our marriage. 

When I married Jemima I had no intention of setting up my own political party. The country's rapid decline was alarming me, though, and I was already mulling over the idea of getting involved with some kind of political movement. I had been hoping that certain people I knew would form a political party I could support, but in the end they had neither the financial means nor the nationwide support to challenge the two established parties, the PPP (Pakistan People's Party) and the PML (pakistan Muslim League). So that option was not available to me. I had also explored the possibility of supporting one of the religious parties. I had assumed that their people must have the same understanding of faith that I did. Sadly I gradually realized that while some of the members of these parties had genuine faith, plenty of others had only a superficial understanding of Islam. Most of them were only using religion, as others used the ethnic or regional card, as a vehicle to get into power. They turned out to be just as corrupt as other politicians too. The more my understanding of political parties and specifically the religious parties deepened, the more I realized that faith without wisdom and knowledge could produce bigots completely lacking in compassion and tolerance. No wonder the Prophet (PBUH) considered the ink of a scholar to be holier than the blood of a martyr. No wonder either that the public usually rejects the religious parties at the polls. At no point in time have they garnered more than 19 per cent of the seats in the national assembly and their share of the vote is lower still. Hence the apparent paradox to the outsider, that while people in Pakistan will sacrifice their lives for Islam, they don't want religious parties running the country. 

When the dust had settled after the furore over my marriage, I again started meeting politically minded people and having endless discussions about how to put up a challenge to the political mafia in Pakistan. I say mafia, because democracy is just a cover for the two parties that take turns in plundering our country. I was appalled at how the ruling class had squandered Pakistan's talent and resources, there seemed to be no limit to their greed. At the same time, I was struck by the generosity and fortitude of the Pakistani people that I had seen because of my work with the hospital. and the raw talent and resourcefulness of the Pakistani overseas community. So many of them, when given a level playing field, had succeeded in their chosen spheres. What, I asked, could Pakistan achieve if we had a system that actually rewarded rather than discouraged merit? 

I came to the conclusion that the only way to change the system was to enter politics myself. However, whenever I thought about forming my own political party I could not work out how I would finance it. The reason why politics in Pakistan had been concentrated within a few families was because the vast majority of people had neither the time nor money to have the luxury of participating. True, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970 elections created a movement that captured the masses' imagination so completely that he was able to defeat the established political houses with political nonentities. However, Bhutto was fortunate that money did not play as big a part in politics as it did after Zia's 1985 non-party elections. Bhutto also had three other advantages. One, he had been a cabinet minister for eight years in Ayub Khan's military dictatorship so already knew the political scene from within. Secondly, there was a huge political vacuum in Pakistan after Ayub Khan because he had crushed all the political parties in West Pakistan. Thirdly, in the Cold War politics of left and right, the entire highly organized left supported Bhutto. My dilemma was how to form a party of 'clean' people who had the time and money to work in politics. 

I also had another issue to think of. I was a married man now and Jemima was trying to adjust to a completely alien environment and culture. If all my time was spent on politics and keeping the hospital going, how would I do justice to my marriage? We discussed the issue endlessly. It was clear by now that there was simply no way left but for decent Pakistanis to get involved in politics. Otherwise the country would be sunk by our politicians. Since Jinnah the quality of our leaders had been steadily deteriorating. All over the world career politicians are disliked, but in Pakistan, as in many developing countries, they are seen as crooks - and with a great deal of justification. What amazed me was that while almost every dinner-table conversation in the country condemned the politicians for destroying Pakistan's potential. no one was prepared to do anything about it. The affluent classes' response to the country's downward spiral was to get Canadian passports or US green cards. They just did not have the guts or the will to give up their comfortable lives and take on the corrupt political class. In Islamabad it was quite common to see members of the elite, who denigrated the politicians in private, grovelling at their feet at public functions. 

When I announced my party, Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) on 25 April 1996, I had lost all fear of dying. This meant I knew exactly why I was going into politics, which was to take on the political mafia in Pakistan; they had always worked on the premise that anyone who threatened them should either be bought or eliminated. The other founding members and I presented it as a 'broad-based movement for change whose mission is to create a free society based on justice, with an independent judiciary as its bedrock'. At a news conference in Islamabad somebody asked me about my lack of experience in politics and I had to acknowledge that I had none. 'But then neither have I any experience in looting and plunder: I added. I had big ideals but it was true that I was ill-equipped. My entry into this world was a bit like when I first saw people swimming. One summer holiday my cousins took me to the pool at Aitchison College. I was four years old and it was the first time I had ever seen a swimming pool. I could see that people seemed to be moving around near the surface of the water so I decided it must be quite shallow and promptly threw off my clothes and jumped straight in. I immediately sank to the bottom. After swallowing a lot of water, I was taught by my cousins to swim within a few days. Politics was a similar experience, though the learning process was much longer. I had nobody to teach me, no mentors and made many mistakes. 

Neither Jemima nor I fully understood what I had got us into. Nor had we anticipated. despite all our discussions. how much strain it would put on our private lives. There was simply no time for family life; for the next month and a half I had to meet an endless stream of people. at all hours. and then I had to make frequent trips to the provinces to appoint party office bearers. We had a tremendous response. but no idea how to deal with it. My fellow founding members were as inexperienced in the political field as I was. Frankly. even if we had had some idea of what to do. we were simply not equipped to cope with it. We could not answer the mail or give proper attention to all of those who came to our Lahore office. One of the main problems I had was learning to judge people. So many people were coming to me. keen to get involved. but I could not tell if they were genuine or not. My sisters consider it one of my principal flaws that I always trust people too much. I would welcome volunteers on board only to then find out hours. weeks or sometimes months later that they were just opportunists and did not share my ideals at all. The political world was full of con men. whose only aim was to obtain power for their self-interest. It would take me almost a decade of meeting thousands and thousands of people before I could acquire the ability to distinguish between genuine and phoney people within minutes. There is no shortcut to learning this skill. 

To make matters worse. the government-sponsored propaganda that I was part of a Jewish plot to take over Pakistan meant that we had a lot of people wanting to join us thinking they could make money out of the party. They reasoned that the Jews must have given us millions of dollars. After all. during the Cold War. socialist organizations in Pakistan received money from the Soviet embassy. So we had funny situations where people came looking for easy money. and were shocked when we asked them for donations instead. One day I found hundreds of cars parked outside my office. I had to fight through crowds of people to get into the office itself. It turned out that some local rag had written that Bill Clinton had given me the go-ahead. From that. these people had surmised that the Americans had decided to install me in power. Meanwhile. I had terrible relations with the Pakistani press. As a sportsman I had never felt the need to court journalists - as far as I was concerned. my performance said it all. But politics was different; in this arena the media could make or break you. just like in the hospital fundraising. 

At the height of the chaos I had to go to England to defend myself in the libel case brought against me by Allan Lamb and Ian Botham. This stemmed from comments I had made about the issue of ball tampering back in 1994. The last thing I wanted was to waste my time with a court case but I was left with no choice. My formidable barrister. George Carman QC. felt the chances of winning in front of an English jury were minuscule (about 10 per cent) because Botham was a national hero. He advised me to settle out of court as the financial costs of losing were astronomical. At the start of the trial I felt fairly confident. since I knew I was innocent and that I had not made the alleged comments. But as it wore on proceedings seemed to be going against me. I started to worry. A loss would have meant bankruptcy and I was worried about how I would support my family if I lost. There was nothing more humiliating than the idea of living off my wife or having to borrow money. Worse still would have been the blow to my two-month-old political party. In the middle of the case I called up Mian Bashir to ask him to pray for me. He sounded pessimistic and said. 'The judge is against you.' Sure enough. after the judge had done his summing up. George Carman asked the jury to leave and told the judge that for the first time in his forty-year career he had to make a complaint that the summing up was biased against his client. Despite the many stressful situations I had been in during my cricket career. the greatest tension I have ever felt was during the six hours or so while the jury deliberated. George Carman was already preparing me for defeat. and writing his appeal. As I was waiting. I got a message from a friend saying that Mian Bashir wanted to speak to me. I phoned him and found him in a cheerful mood. 'Allah is changing the jury's mind!' he said. It returned a 10-2 majority verdict in my favour. 

When I got home a couple of months later, the fervour over my new party had subsided. Now at least we had a period of calm and could organize ourselves. I started touring various cities and towns to gather support and form our party's organization. The calm did not last long. On 5 November 1996, President Farooq Leghari dissolved Benazir Bhutto's government and announced elections in three months' time. When I met with Leghari, he told me that Sharif and Benazir had each siphoned off US$1.5 billion from the country and pledged to hold them accountable. My party was only six months old by then and I had lost two months in the UK because of the court case. Nonetheless we decided to participate in the election campaign. We felt it would be the perfect opportunity to organize ourselves as a national party. Plus I felt it was an ideal way to really get the issue of corruption debated publicly in the run-up to the polls. I realized that there was no way we could make much of an impact as far as votes were concerned as we had no organization at the grass-roots level. So it was already quite clear in my mind that we would campaign all over Pakistan and then withdraw a week before the polls. When I started our campaign everyone was amazed at the huge crowds that came to my rallies. The youth especially came to listen to me in droves, as this was the section of the population most hungry for change. When the Tehreek-e-Insaf's rallies, which were bigger than those for Sharif or Benazir, were shown on television, there was a rush of candidates keen to stand on our party ticket. We formed a board to select our prospective candidates. In our zeal to make sure that nobody who had any blemish on their character was given our party ticket, a lot of good people were lost. Anyone who had a political background was given extra vetting. 

Seeing the potency of my attack, Sharif started making overtures to me. First he offered me the most senior position in his party after him, then he offered my party an electoral alliance with twenty seats in the national assembly. Everyone knew at this stage that Sharif was going to win the elections simply because there was no other national party apart from Benazir's now discredited PPP. For us it was a huge compliment that a party that was just a few months old should be considered enough of a threat to be made such an offer. However, I had no hesitation in rejecting him as I considered him just as corrupt as Benazir. An alliance with Sharif would have compromised my principles. I had only come into politics to oppose unscrupulous politicians like him so how could I align myself with his party? While I believe we all have to make compromises in life, they should be made to attain your vision, not on the vision itself. I was also fortunate in that, unlike professional politicians, I did not need power for its perks and privileges. I was very clear about the fact that unless I could implement my agenda of reform, there was no need to be in politics, as I already had everything I could possibly desire in life. I felt it would be much better to be in the opposition and be a check on the government than be part of the power structure and have my hands tied. Joining Sharif would not only have meant I became part of the status quo, but I would have also lost all my credibility. 

The next development was that Benazir turned on Leghari, accusing him of being a traitor to the PPP. The ferocity of her attacks clearly rattled him and he threw his lot in with Sharif, forgetting his pledge to try him and Benazir for corruption before allowing them to contest elections. A month before the polls it became clear to everyone that Leghari's caretaker government had entered into an agreement with Sharif's PML (N), compromising what should have been a neutral administration. The entire establishment from then on began to bat for Sharif. Administrative officers chosen by him were posted in crucial positions in his political stronghold of Punjab. 

It is almost impossible to beat whichever party is backed by the establishment in Pakistan. Once the establishment makes its party of choice clear, the powerful district administration comes into action and the local power brokers fall into line. Everyone wants to be on the winning side, because only the winner can gain the influence over the powerful bureaucracy needed to dole out patronage to his cronies. 

Keen to align themselves with those looking most likely to take power, various other forces began to jostle for position: the big feudal families and the criminal world - the smugglers and the drug barons. In every district in the country there is an underworld element that controls anything from 500 to 2,000 votes. The criminal mafia has to be with the winning party as it needs its protection to operate. Even for the common man - be he bureaucrat, shopkeeper, police officer or cab driver - getting ahead in Pakistan revolves around his links with the incumbent rulers. I wrote an open letter exposing the points of the agreement between Leghari and Sharif. I decided the best thing to do next would be to pull out of the elections, as we had achieved the objectives we had set ourselves. However, by criticizing Leghari's government and calling him to account on his broken promises I had now opened myself up to attack on a third front. 

A week before the polls I called a meeting of our senior party members and updated them on the situation. I told them that the maximum number of seats we might win was three but most likely we were not going to win any. I felt that our party was too young to take such a crushing defeat and that donations would dry up if we lost. How would we then finance the party? Moreover we simply did not have the resources or organizational capacity to participate. In Pakistan a political party needs to organize buses to take people to the polling stations and people to staff them, with polling agents for both men and women. It is a huge organizational and logistical undertaking. But the majority of our party hierarchy wanted to fight on; some had allowed themselves to be convinced by the size of the crowds at our rallies that we would win a lot of seats. This made me realize how people in politics delude themselves. They always under estimate the opposition's strength and exaggerate their own. In cricket it used to be the opposite. I had to constantly stress to my team not to overestimate the opposition's strength and be overawed. There were those in the party who felt that we would lose face if we backed out now. Another argument was that all the money spent by our candidates on elections would have been wasted. The person who swayed me in the end was Hamid Khan, a senior and much respected lawyer in our party. He felt that the experience we would gain from contesting the elections would be invaluable; having learned from our defeat we would be well prepared next time round, which is when our real chance would come. 

In taking part in the elections we took the most difficult path. It really was the Charge of the Light Brigade but without the horses and without the arms. No party - however popular - can win an election without a grass-roots political organization. Our minuscule financial resources were nothing compared to those of the two main parties, both of whom had already made plenty of money from their time in power. We had major issues with media coverage too. At the time there was only one television channel and it was government-controlled. During the whole ninety-day campaign each party was only given a half-hour slot. This clearly did not give us enough air-time to mobilize and motivate people about our agenda and encourage them to get out there and vote. I had also had a problem getting my message across because of my inexperience and inability to deal with the press. I found my statements would come out completely distorted. I later discovered that there were journalists on politicians' payrolls who were experts at killing or distorting opposition statements. I came to realize that the freedom of the press was really a myth; the newspaper owners pursued their own agendas through their publications. The freedom of the press only stood as long as their interests were not threatened. In another indication of my inexperience. I made a media blunder just a few days before the elections. jang. Pakistan's biggest-circulation paper. quoted me saying that while we hoped for the best. it was possible that we might not get even one seat. Of course no political leader should ever say that kind of thing. whether it is correct or not. because it completely demoralizes your workers. 

Compounding our difficulties. the media campaign against us by the PML (N) had been highly effective. We were simply defenceless in the face of its onslaught. Their attack was focused entirely on my personal life. They even stooped so low as to keep calling up a female friend of mine. Sita White. and publishing lurid interviews with her. More damaging still was the conspiracy theory about a Zionist plot to take over Pakistan. They went to the extent of getting a newspaper to publish a photograph of a cheque for 40 million pounds supposedly given to me by Jemima's father for my election campaign. Then statements from political and religious figures were printed saying they would not allow the Jews to take over Pakistan. After the elections the paper involved printed a few lines on the inside pages. admitting that the cheque was a forgery. But the damage was done and it was too close to the elections for our struggling media office to change public perceptions. 

Given our various weaknesses we had only one hope and that was for a heavy turnout. Unfortunately. on Election Day the polling booths were deserted. especially in the cities. Most Pakistanis obviously felt that voting would not change their lives for the better anyway. It was clear that Sharif would win and Benazir would be wiped out but no one had anticipated the margin of his victory. He ended up with a two-thirds majority in parliament although everyone looked at the number of votes cast with great suspicion. The president had announced a turnout of 25 per cent by the evening of the polls. while the BBC put it at less than 18 per cent. By the following morning the nation was told the turnout was 38 per cent. 

It was only after Sharif's government was dismissed in 1999 that a senior member of the election commission explained to me how the polls had been rigged. Certain constituencies were selected for manipulation. Within those constituencies. polling stations where rigging was easily possible were ear-marked as 'red polling booths' . The elections were held during Ramadan. so the moment the voting had finished at these booths. the election agents were taken to break their fast some distance away; in certain cases reluctant polling agents were ordered to go by the army personnel guarding the election stations. They were then kept away for forty-five minutes to an hour. In the meantime. a couple of members of the election commission stuffed the ballot boxes with votes for the PML (N) candidate. In order to avoid detection. they cleverly raised the amount of votes of the number-two candidate so that the gap between the winning candidate and the rest was not too glaring. There was. however. a huge gap between the top two candidates and everybody else. I have to say I felt sorry for Benazir. despite having been her biggest critic; all the cards were stacked against her. With the caretaker government and all its power firmly behind Sharif it was obvious that she did not stand a chance in hell. As expected. she was completely routed. As for Tehreek-e-Insaf. we failed to win a single seat. 

(Following the 2008 elections. the Electoral Commission found that 37 million of the 80 million voters registered were 'bogus' - that is. duplicated. multiple. or bogus entries. In June 2011. on my petition to the Supreme Court. the 37 million bogus votes were annulled. and the court ordered 35 million youth votes to be registered.) 

Luckily. over my twenty-one years of international cricket - which had included many a drubbing - I had developed a defence mechanism to protect myself and manage the more painful aspects of failure. One of my worst memories was losing to India in India on our 1979/80 tour. We had to sneak back into Pakistan in the dead of night and unannounced. so scared were we of being humiliated by the outraged public. The customs staff confiscated almost everything they possibly could off us. searching even our pockets and keeping us at the airport for two hours. For days afterwards we all avoided going out in public to escape the inevitable backlash. Yet seven years later we arrived at the same Lahore airport after beating India. We never even made it to customs. The airport staff carried us on their shoulders from the tarmac to the crowd of tens of thousands who had flooded the airport. For five miles from the airport into the city centre there were people lining the roads cheering us. The only other time I saw such jubilation and euphoria was when we landed in Lahore after winning the World Cup in 1992. So by the end of my career I had a pretty good idea about the dynamics of victory and defeat. I had learned not to lose my head when we won and to come to terms with and deal with the bad times. when you became the object of the general public's ire and even your close friends changed towards you. 

The first thing to understand with failure is that there is no point in making excuses - there are no listeners. As they say. failure is an orphan. and you're alone. It is best to accept it graciously and congratulate the winner. Then you must have the ability to analyse where you went wrong; this is the hallmark of successful people. that they are their own best critic. One of the reasons I succeeded in cricket. when compared to more talented cricketers than me. was because I could analyse my weaknesses accurately. In October 1984. when I started to bowl again after a two-year lay-off following a stress fracture in my left shin. I discovered I had developed a flaw in my bowling action. For three months I experimented and tried everything to remove the flaw. but nothing worked. Such was my concentration that I dreamed and saw myself bowling and worked out how to remove the flaw. all in my sleep. The next morning in the nets I corrected my action. Some cricketers' careers have been finished by analysing things wrongly. as there is a great danger that - demoralized by failure - you can actually make a wrong analysis and compound the failure. The best naturally gifted timer of the ball I ever saw was Zaheer Abbas: in 1978 he completely annihilated the touring Indian bowling attack in Pakistan. A year later. when we toured India. there was massive public expectation of him. I could see him crumbling under this weight but rather than blocking the fear of failure. and concentrating on managing his innings. he started looking elsewhere. First he started fiddling with his technique; one which. I reminded him. had enabled him to break records less than a year ago. A few days later he had his eyes tested. was there something wrong there? Two weeks after that. he was in such a state that he felt someone had cast a black magic spell on him. and he ended up being dropped from the team. Over the years. I found a lot of people being defeated by failure because of their inability to analyse their mistakes properly. 

After the election disaster. I wanted to seek solitude. and make my own analysis of our disaster. Another part of my strategy is that it is useless reading any newspapers - why torture yourself by reading gloating articles by critics who were just waiting for you to fail? I cut down on public engagements too because the more people you meet the more suggestions you receive about where you went wrong. Suggestions being free. they are never in short supply. and all they end up doing is prolonging the bitter taste of failure. So I would always hunker down and keep myself to myself while I made my own analysis and prepared my strategy for how to bounce back. After the elections I grabbed the opportunity to have some time off and escaped to the Salt Range with my family. where we spent a blissful few days. I had hardly seen Jemima and Sulaiman for the previous few months. For all the pain of the political loss. the happiness I got spending precious time with my first-born more than compensated. 

In fact this was the easiest defeat for me to accept. as I had already known that the best we could hope for was a mere three seats. We certainly were not ready and did not have the team to form a government and implement my vision. I felt too that these elections had at least been useful in providing us with an opportunity to put forward the issues of corruption and accountability. In addition. the campaign had helped us build up a national network. However. our loss had a devastating effect not only on my young party. but also on Jemima. my sisters and close friends. They had absolutely no idea how to handle the taunts and ridicule they faced when they went out in public or read the newspapers. Poor Jemima. as well as putting up with the whole Zionist plot story. had to see endless articles criticizing. mocking and ridiculing her husband. And I have to say I was roasted by the media. I was attacked by the right. the left and the powerful lobby of crooked politicians. The latter were particularly vindictive as I had advocated capital punishment for those whose corruption was proved beyond a certain amount. Since 1983. when I had broken my leg and had a bad year. I had had a series of successes - with both cricket and the hospital. The election defeat was the first big opportunity for those envious of that success and keen to see me fail. People love to see an icon fall - it is part of human nature. And we had been completely wiped out; it wasn'tjust a defeat. it was a decimation. It became clear to me that we could not beat the status quo politicians on their pitch; we could only win if we could create a movement like the 1970 Bhutto movement. where people vote for the party rather than the candidate. 

A few weeks after the elections. Mian Bashir dropped in to commiserate. Jemima told him that she wished I had never gone into politics. She told him how much respect there was for me in Pakistan because of my cricket. and the cancer hospital. and that now I had become a figure of ridicule and the butt of jokes. my private life raked over in the media. She told him that she had always felt in her heart that I should only have done humanitarian work and stayed out of any controversy. He listened to her with a quiet smile before responding that the object of this life was not to be popular and that those who made that their purpose were condemned to live by fickle public opinion. Then he told her the story of this highly respectable and successful businessman who was happily married and leading a contented life. At the age of forty he was inspired by the Almighty to tell the people of his town that there was only one God. When he tried to convey this message. though. they became upset because it was against the beliefs of their forefathers. who worshipped many idols as gods. Besides. every year lots of people from all over the region visited the town to worship the idols and the townsfolk made a lot of money from these pilgrims. So their financial interests were also being threatened by the new message. When this man persisted he was subjected to all sorts of abuse and ridicule. Being honourable and sensitive. he was deeply hurt by people' s attitudes. One day his uncle mocked and ridiculed him so much that he came home and cried in his wife's arms. Because his wife knew him so well. she knew he was telling the truth and totally believed in him. She stood by him and urged him on with his calling. That man was the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and he eventually succeeded in founding one of the greatest civilizations in human history. 'This is just a passing phase.' Mian Bashir said. 'Besides. if decent people do not come into politics. the country will continue to be plundered by crooked politicians and soon become unlivable in.' Jemima began to relax after that. though she would insist that I organized myself better so that I gave my family its fair share of time. I began to manage my time more efficiently. but my troubles were only just beginning. 

The party was in severe financial difficulty. A lot of money had been wasted in the thick of the election campaign and we had incurred loans that had to be paid off. But who was going to fund a party that had suffered such a crushing loss? When I was captain. if we suffered a defeat I would avoid team meetings for a couple of days because they were counterproductive and would invariably turn into a blame-game that left the team divided and demoralized. The difference was that a cricket team had to rally itself for the next match. which gave them something to look forward to. In the case of my party. the next elections were five years away. Who was going to face the ruthless Sharif brothers all that time? Nawaz' s brother Shahbaz was also a politician and the two of them were masters at victimizing their opponents. Just like a vanquished cricket team, my party started searching for scapegoats. Members who had urged us to contest the polls were crucified by the ones who had agreed with me that it was best to pull out. Others simply lost faith in my leadership. They had known me as someone who was successful in whatever field I entered. This political rout had shaken their confidence in me. These people did not realize that when I first played cricket I was not successful at all. In fact I was dropped after my first test match and it took me five years before I consolidated my position on the team; after my first tour a lot of newspapers called me 'Imran Khan't'. The hospital project too had plenty of early hiccups; the general opinion amongst our educated classes had initially been that it was a non-starter, and even once it was built, some sceptics never thought we would be able to run it. 

Other differences between members of our party's central executive committee that had been simmering for a while now came out into the open. Some of my senior party members went into depression. A few just left the party, usually the ones who had felt that allying with me would provide a shortcut to power. Then there were those who could not think of hanging around till the next polls or were scared of political victimization. It is customary for the victor in Pakistani politics to use the police and bureaucracy to victimize his opponents. For example, income-tax officers can suddenly target your business or thugs will turn up on your doorstep to beat you up. My cousin Asad Jehangir joined the police force after graduating from Oxford in 1969. He once told me about an incident after the 1977 elections when he was posted to Sindh as a young and idealistic police officer. One of the local landlords came to see him after he had been elected. After exchanging formalities he politely requested the bewildered Asad to send a couple of policemen to his political opponent's house to give him a sound thrashing. In our feudal culture, it was almost as if it was the winner's prerogative to further humiliate the loser. The judiciary gives no protection to the opposition either, having always been subordinate to the executive. Because of this total lack of rule of law, some Pakistanis will vote for someone despite knowing he is totally crooked out of fear of retribution or the lure of patronage. Landless peasants are especially vulnerable because their landlord can threaten to turf them out of their homes or beat them up if they don't vote for him or whichever party or candidate he is supporting. 

Losing the elections not only made collecting money for the party difficult but it hit the cancer hospital. Each year it had a huge deficit because of treating the majority of its patients for free. At this point it only generated 30 per cent of its revenues and for the rest we relied on donations. During the elections my powerful political opponents had - as well as targeting my personal life - made allegations about the hospital in the press, claiming that it was not in fact treating the poor for free and that donations were being used on my election campaign. This inevitably caused some donors to doubt us and fundraising stalled. The two most important board members of the hospital, Razaak Dawood and Dr Parvez Hasan, asked me to give up politics as they feared it would destroy the great project. They told me to be realistic and that I had no chance of succeeding in our corrupt political culture. All my life I have been told to be pragmatic - I heard this again and again during the course of my cricket career and all through the early years of the hospital. But I resolutely remain an idealist. For me, pragmatism today in Pakistan means accepting a corrupt and oppressive status quo. At times like this in my life, when things seem hopeless, I always look back to similar occasions - in cricket or in the hospital - when persistence eventually led to success. 

Nonetheless, even my idealism was tested in 1997, which was to prove an extremely difficult year. Aside from my political woes and the hospital funding problem, I had a personal financial crisis. The court case in England against Botham and Lamb had drained me financially, and since they had appealed against the verdict against them, I could not get my costs back. Had the case gone to appeal there was no way I could have fought it as I had spent so much money during the elections. To top it all Jemima's father, Jimmy Goldsmith, was dying from cancer and she was totally distraught. He passed away in July 1997, leaving his family and friends bereft. A few weeks later Princess Diana died. Her visit to the hospital earlier in the year had brought fresh donations, giving us enough breathing space for me to organize some more fundraisers and stop it going under. She had offered to attend a fundraiser in Saudi Arabia later in the year to help further. Her death capped what was the worst twelve months of my life since 1985 when I lost my mother. Looking back, the only thing that made me happy that year was watching my son Sulaiman grow up. For me, nothing in my life gave me more joy than having children. Had I known how happy they would make me I would have got married when I was younger. 

Aside from my faith and my family, what helped me during this period of my life were the lessons I had learned in cricket. They told me that there were no shortcuts in life. If you wanted something you had to work for it. And that hard work was never wasted. If one had a passion for what one wanted to achieve then hard work ceased to be drudgery. You only lose when you give up in your mind. In addition, I had learned that circumstances never remain the same; but never must one give up if one feels one is heading towards defeat. I used to find that at the start of a five-day test match one could never predict how the five days would pan out, as it was dependent on so many factors. The pessimists in the team would sometimes conclude after the first day that we were going to lose and more or less accept defeat. Being an optimist I always used to look at it differently. I found unexpected situations would suddenly give you the opportunity to make a comeback in the game. For instance, the weather would change, or the way the pitch was playing. Or the other team could just make a mistake you could capitalize on. If you hadn't already given up you could make the most of these variables. I have kept this attitude in life. Besides, hopelessness is faithlessness. There were people within my party, as well as plenty of political commentators, who started predicting that after Sharif's heavy mandate no one would be able to dislodge him for the next decade. At this point my party was completely written off by everyone. Sharif's party itself was already planning for the next twenty years so carried away was it by its two-thirds majority. I thought differently and was to be proved right. With my usual dogged optimism, I set about dealing with the various issues on my plate. First was the hospital. On the back of Princess Diana's visit we had started a campaign to invite all opinion­ makers, journalists, columnists and newspaper editors to the hospital to visit. By the beginning of 1998, all these efforts combined to lift the hospital's finances out of danger. By 1999 donations had gone back to the pre-election level. Meanwhile, my personal financial problems started easing up too. I began to write and commentate on cricket just enough to make my contributions to the party and pay the bills. In 1999 Botham and Lamb dropped their appeal. so I did not have to think of additional funds. With better organization I also began to have more time to enjoy family life. My greatest sacrifice for being in politics was not always being able to spend as much time as I wanted to with my family. In April 1999, the Almighty blessed us with our second son, Kasim. 

Politics, however, was still a problem. I had managed to settle the party's debts within the year but raising money was almost impossible. Our office holders never had sufficient funds to do full-time politics. As the country's economic situation worsened, some of our office bearers went bankrupt; others had to work doubly hard to earn the same amount of income. A lot of my time was spent in settling disputes, usually when the workers of a particular area would refuse to acknowledge a senior office bearer because he was not giving enough time to the party. If the head of a district did not work, the whole district would become inactive. We were up against the feudal landlords and career politicians, people who had often inherited a constituency and had the infrastructure and resources to do politics full-time. I also had difficulty finding leadership for my party. This is in fact a general problem in Pakistan. During my cricketing career I always used to wonder why there was so much intrigue within the Pakistan cricket team. I played cricket in England for several first -class teams - Oxford, Worcester and Sussex. I also played for New South Wales in the Australian Sheffield Shield competition. I never saw any intrigue against captains in first -class teams I played for in England or Australia, even though some were pretty poor. Yet in Pakistan there were always groups within the team that were ready to undermine the captain whenever they lost. I was made captain in 1982 when the team rebelled and refused to play under the incumbent skipper. After I retired in 1992 there were multiple changes in the captaincy. Pakistan made close to thirty changes between 1992 and 2010 while in that same period Australia had only four different captains. I also had a problem of frequent infighting within the fundraising committees for the hospital that I had set up in various cities abroad. After a lot of research I realized that the reason for lack of leadership in Pakistan is partly because of our school system. Almost all of our test cricketers and political workers are state-school educated but sadly the public education system has deteriorated dramatically in the past forty years. Most schools just do not groom students in the art of leadership, failing to teach them how to handle responsibility. It was different at Aitchison, where there was a system of prefects, head boys and team captains. On top of that we had military training so that we were taught about teamwork and the qualities a leader needed to command respect. Unfortunately the vast majority of our private schools and almost all the government schools have neither any sports facilities nor any extracurricular activities. Students therefore do not have the opportunity to learn that authority brings with it responsibility and abusing that position loses one the respect of one's subordinates. 

Despite my struggle to find the right people to work with and the sheer drudgery of the endless travelling, my criss-crossing of the country was highly educational and at times inspiring. This was especially so when I met people who, with no resources but lots of passion, were doing everything they could for Pakistan. I found the biggest hurdle in my way was cynicism. People had been led up the garden path so many times that they were sceptical about everyone. How could they be sure I was not like the previous politician offering change? The period of about four years after our failed election bid was one of great learning. Meeting so many people was an education in itself. I learned to judge people more effectively and gradually began to be able to make up my mind very quickly about the mindset of those I was dealing with. Sharif had corrupted politics so much that most people were looking to make money out of it. I found dealing with such types the worst aspect of politics. I learned to get to the point quickly. This ability to distinguish between the important and the trivial allowed me to manage my time better. Also, after dealing with our devastating electoral loss, and the subsequent stream of crises within the party, I had a good understanding of my team and knew which members I could depend on. I had discovered in cricket that you only know the real worth of your players when they are put under pressure. 

As I had predicted, Sharif was not to last long. Between his economic mismanagement and growing disregard for the institutions of a modern state, antagonism towards him mounted. In September 1999 virtually the entire opposition formed the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) on a one-point agenda to campaign for his removal. That year he had railroaded the 15th Amendment - which would have given him dictatorial powers as the . amir ul-momineen', or leader of the faithful - through parliament with his brute majority. He was already behaving like a Mughal emperor after pushing through the 13th Amendment (which made the presidency impotent) and the 14th Amendment (which made the parliament a rubber-stamping body and meant that no member of his party could disobey the chairman or they would lose their seat). After the 15th Amendment there would have been no check to his already unprecedented powers. We feared that once the senate election took place in March 2000, Sharif would then command a majority there too, enabling him to make the 15th Amendment law. Sharif and his party had already done something that remains one of the most disgraceful events in our country's history: senior members of his party, along with party workers, physically attacked the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 1997, and the chief justice - who had dared to start contempt proceedings against Sharif - had to flee from the court. 

The Grand Democratic Alliance held rallies in all the major cities. It was clear that public opinion had turned against Sharif; though the ordinary people of Pakistan were not concerned about the 15th Amendment, they were being crushed by growing unemployment and a faltering economy on one side and constant price rises (especially utility bills) on the other. 

Further weakening Sharif's position was growing tension with the army chief, General Musharraf, after the ill-conceived and disastrous Kargil operation. In May 1999, New Delhi discovered that Pakistani soldiers and Kashmiri freedom fighters had occupied the Kargil heights, in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Ironically this came just three months after Sharif had hosted the Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on his historic peace-making visit to Lahore - the first time, since the Indian involvement in the conflict in East Pakistan that had led to the establishment of Bangladesh, that the two heads of government had met formally and issued a declaration (and a memorandum of understanding which committed both parties to peace) as a result. According to Sharif's version of events, the then commander-in-chief of the army, Musharraf, had launched the operation without consulting him; however, Musharraf insisted that the prime minister had been on board. Whatever the truth of the matter, Sharif found himself in a difficult situation. Pakistan was slammed by the international community and the Indians retaliated. Seeing the Pakistani position was untenable, Sharif was forced to beg Bill Clinton for help in brokering a peace deal with New Delhi. Sharif ordered the troops to withdraw, confusing a humiliated Pakistani public who had been fed the official line that only Kashmiri freedom fighters had occupied the Kargil heights and that Pakistan had no control over them. There then followed a cold war between Musharraf and Sharif. Any genuine leader would have hauled the army chief in front of him and court-martialled him for what turned out to be one of Pakistan's biggest debacles - not just in terms of lives, money and international reputation but also damage to the Kashmiri cause. Instead Sharif dithered for months before eventually attempting to remove Musharraf in the most bizarre way. On 12 October 1999, the army chief was mid-air on his way home from a trip to Sri Lanka when Sharif sacked him and appointed Ziauddin Butt as his replacement. He diverted Musharraf's plane in order to buy himself more time and a chaotic few hours ensued before army officials loyal to Musharraf rebelled and launched a full-scale military takeover. The victorious Musharraf had the prime minister and his cronies arrested. Military rule was back. 

The amazing thing was that the same GDA members who had been virtually pleading with the army to remove Sharif (there was no constitutional way of getting rid of him) were later to club together with him and form another alliance against Musharraf. Benazir's PPP began to make overtures to Sharif when she realized that the army was not going to ask her to join the government and was instead bent on pursuing corruption charges against her. When I found out, I could not believe what contempt these opportunistic politicians had for the people of Pakistan. Just a few months previously they were telling the public that Sharif was the greatest threat to democracy in the country and now they had to ally with him 'in order to save Pakistan's democracy'. Benazir and Sharif had been trying to expose each other's corruption to the public for eleven years. Indeed the Sharif government had spent a fortune in taxpayers' money trying to get Benazir convicted of graft and had put Zardari injail; yet when they realized that Musharrafwas intent on charging them both, they clung to each other. That sums up Pakistan's politics from 1988 to 1999. No wonder that according to a Gallup survey, 80 per cent of the population supported the military takeover. As for Sharif, he was later tried and convicted on charges of hijacking and terrorism. He took a plea bargain to avoid life imprisonment and was exiled to Saudi Arabia in 2000. 

While I welcomed what seemed like an end to the Benazir-Sharif merry-go­ round, I was also thankful for Musharraf's coup for personal reasons. Since our marriage Jemima had been doing her best to get involved in life in Pakistan. Not only had she converted to Islam and adapted to Pakistani culture, but she had learned to speak Urdu quite well. In the elections she had campaigned for me, giving speeches in Urdu. She had also helped me with the hospital fundraising. We could sell our fundraising dinners much better if she was guaranteed to be there. She also started a clothing business, having clothes embroidered in Pakistan and selling them in the West. All the profits went to the hospital and her business gave employment to hundreds of women. I was particularly proud of her when she decided to help Afghan refugees in Jalozai camp living in sub-human conditions. She had read an article about how some children had died of cold at the camp, home to thousands of refugees since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Being a mother herself, this affected her deeply and so she launched a charity and raised millions of rupees for tents, provisions and medical clinics for the refugees. 

However, just as we were working to make our cross-cultural marriage succeed, external forces were attempting to sabotage our family life. We discovered how truly vicious the political mafia in Pakistan could be. In December 1998, just to embarrass me politically, an antique-smuggling accusation was slapped on Jemima by Sharif's government. It alleged that tiles Jemima had sent to her mother as a Christmas present were antique, despite the fact that they were bought from a shop that never even claimed they were of historical interest. Pakistan's laws are very strict about the exporting of antiques. After the case was registered, Jemima had one of the tiles examined by three museums in England and had a thermo-luminescence test done to date it. All confirmed the tiles were modern. So keen was the government to implicate Jemima in the case, though, that it did not even follow the customs department's own laws. A nine-member committee comprising members of the archaeological department, the customs department and the person accused have to deliberate before an object is declared an antique. Instead, one government employee in the archaeological department declared them to be antique. The case should have immediately been thrown out of court but was pending for months and the judge kept giving the government time to improve its case. Since smuggling is a non-bailable offence in Pakistan and potentially carried a sentence of up to seven years in jail, I decided that Jemima should stay in England until the case was over. This again meant a disruption to our family life. Neither of us could take a risk with a government-controlled judiciary, especially with a two-year-old and another baby on the way. After the military coup, the case against Jemima was immediately thrown out, but she had been forced to stay out of the country for eleven months in total. 

Sadly, even after this major respite, politics was to cause further disruption to our family life. If the 1997 elections had been hard on our marriage, the 2002 polls were even tougher. At least in 1997 Jemima had been able to participate in my campaign; this time she had to stay out. Instead of being able to be the asset she should have been, my political opponents had turned her into a liability. Because they couldn't hurl the usual accusations of sleaze at me, they attacked me through her. It was especially hard for her not to be actively involved because she is basically a very political person. This was a great blow for our marriage. A cross-cultural marriage can work if your passions and objectives are the same but Jemima had to be sidelined. And even then she was not spared; spurious stories about her continued to emerge in the Pakistani press. A comment about having read a book by Salman Rushdie for her university dissertation on post-colonial literature turned into a story saying she had chosen him as her guide. There were demonstrations calling for her citizenship to be revoked. Hard for anyone. this kind of treatment was particularly distressing for somebody like Jemima. who was naturally shy and sensitive. Compounding our difficulties. during the campaign I was away touring the country for about five months. I was campaigning almost single-handedly. my best candidate having withdrawn. I barely saw my wife and children. In the end. the party won one seat - my own in Mianwali. which given the lack of freedom the elections were conducted under. with the whole state machinery helping my opponent. was a great achievement. 

It came at a heavy personal cost. When I returned home to Islamabad I found Jemima demoralized and for the first time realized that she was losing the battle and giving up. I had already started to harbour guilt about her being so unhappy. She had tried incredibly hard. but my political career and the constant attacks on her were very difficult. I felt guilty because as the older partner I was more responsible for our marriage. She was so young when we married and when we made the decision to launch my party - how could she have known what such a life would entail in a foreign land? But I should have thought about all the possible consequences. For the first time I began to think that maybe I had been irresponsible; just because I was battle-hardened after years of struggle did not mean that my wife should have been thrown at such a tender age into the turbulent world of Pakistani politics. Adapting to a completely alien culture was already challenge enough. Personal attacks on people' s families. especially their wives. are rare in Pakistani culture. It had never occurred to me that people could stoop so low as to attack a young foreign woman because of her husband's political work. 

So when Jemima said she wanted to return to England to study for a one-year masters degree in Modern Trends in Islam at London' s School of Oriental and African Studies and take the boys with her. as devastating as the news was. I didn't resist. As always. I believed that somehow circumstances might change. I hoped that if the political climate improved I could lure her back. or that she would come to realize that the life we had created together in Pakistan was worth staying for. But in my heart I knew it was the beginning of the end. Above all. a marriage cannot work with two people living on different continents. Within a year I could see that she was absorbed by her life back in London with her family and friends and was happy there. The six months leading up to our divorce and the six months after made up the hardest year of my life. The children' s obvious distress exacerbated the misery; they are always the ones who suffer the most in divorce. Sulaiman. being older. felt it more and seeing his pain doubled my pain. I missed them terribly. Nothing filled the void. I loved fatherhood more than anything I had ever experienced in life. Having had children after my cricket career I had been at home to watch every phase of their growing up and was a hands-on parent. an experience so many fathers miss out on because of their work. My life had been work and family; I hardly ever saw my friends or went to dinner parties. Now not having them around was the hardest thing to come to terms with. For the first time I began to understand how people could lose the will to live. Usually someone who wakes up every morning with optimism and joy at facing a new day. I suddenly found it hard to get out of bed. 

Once again. faith got me through these difficult times. Once I had come to terms with the divorce I picked myself up and threw myself back into pursuing my political and humanitarian work. The optimist in me cannot help but see the brighter side of a situation and I felt that in many ways I was luckier than most in my divorce. There was no acrimony. none of the bitterness caused when one partner has been unfaithful to the other, no financial disputes and no lawyers involved. Jemima is very generous in giving me time with the boys. They come to stay with me during their school holidays and I then devote myself entirely to them. Whenever I'm in England, I stay with my ex­ mother-in-law, Lady Annabel. who still treats me as part of the family. Her sons Ben and Zac are like younger brothers to me. The rest of the time I am free to focus on my work. Moreover, the burden of Jemima's unhappiness was lifted from me and if there's one thing worse than seeing a loved one leave, it's seeing a loved one unhappy. As the Quran says: 'After every hardship there is ease' (Quran 65: 7 and 7: 42); and I consoled myself with the Quranic verse that sometimes Allah doesn't answer our prayers because he knows what's best for us. 

It is hard to say that with hindsight I would have done things differently anyway. My married friends always envied me my life when I was a bachelor but the greatest happiness and contentment in my life came from my marriage. I always was a risk-taker so I was willing to take the lows with the highs. Whenever I looked back and thought about what else I could have done I felt that, given the circumstances, I had worked harder at making my marriage work than at anything else in my life. So there were no regrets. If anything could have prevented me from marrying Jemima, it was the realization that she was maybe too young and inexperienced to be presented with such a challenge. It pained me that she had to endure all the suffering that divorce entails. She gained two beautiful sons, though, and a second home in Pakistan, where she was much loved. She is still very attached to the country and always the first to rally round when disaster befalls us - be it floods or earthquakes. People often ask me why I didn't go to London to save our relationship but it was never an option. I could never imagine living in London, just making a living out of cricket journalism. For me that would have been a purposeless existence. I cannot even imagine life without a passion and a purpose; once I had cricket, now I have my political struggle - which was to become all the more urgent after the turmoil in Pakistan unleashed by the 9/11 attacks. And Jemima knew that. She did not marry a lounge lizard; my drive was one of the things that had attracted her to me. I think I would have been diminished in her eyes if I had lost that drive.