Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi was born on 5 October 1952 in Lahore. His first life was cricket: a Test debut in 1971, 21 years in the national side, 3,807 runs and 362 wickets in Tests, and immortality as the captain who lifted the 1992 Cricket World Cup in Melbourne. He retired that year as one of the greatest all-rounders the game has seen — later inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

His second life was philanthropy. In memory of his mother, he built Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore (1994) — Pakistan’s first specialist cancer hospital, funded largely by public donation — and later Namal University in Mianwali. Both projects taught him something politics would demand: how to raise money from ordinary Pakistanis and spend it accountably.

His third life began on 25 April 1996, when he founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) — the Movement for Justice — on an anti-corruption, welfare-state platform. For 15 years it was a one-man party going nowhere. Then Pakistan changed, and so did his fortunes.

What did he actually stand for? Three ideas carried through all three lives. First, accountability — the belief that Pakistan’s core disease is elite corruption, and that recovering “looted wealth” would fix the economy. Second, the welfare state — his constant invocation of Riasat-e-Madinah, the Prophet’s (PBUH) Medina as a model of a just state, which translated into Ehsaas and the Sehat Card in office. Third, an independent foreign policy — “no to slavery” in his phrasing: good relations with all, subservience to none, a stance that thrilled supporters and alarmed diplomats in equal measure. Admirers call this a coherent philosophy; critics call it sloganeering. Either way, no Pakistani politician of his generation has bent the national conversation around himself so completely.

Khan’s government — searched by many as “Imran Khan gov” — defined itself against its predecessors: austerity at the top (he declined the PM House, working from the smaller Military Secretary’s residence), welfare at the bottom. Its flagship was the Ehsaas Programme, Pakistan’s largest-ever social safety net, anchored by emergency cash transfers; alongside it came the Sehat Sahulat Card, extending free hospitalisation to millions of families, and the Billion Tree Tsunami, one of the world’s largest reforestation drives.

The economy was the permanent crisis: a balance-of-payments emergency inherited in 2018 forced an IMF programme, the rupee slid, and inflation bit. COVID-19 (2020–21) became the government’s defining test — Khan’s “smart lockdown” approach, balancing lives and livelihoods, won cautious praise from the WHO even as critics called it lax. Foreign policy had its moments: the Kartarpur Corridor opening (2019), the famous “absolutely not” (June 2021, ruling out US bases in Pakistan), and a tilt toward “neutrality” as the world re-polarised.

The full record of those years: Imran Khan’s Government: Inside the PTI Years (2018–2022).

Imran Khan has been imprisoned at Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi, since August 2023. The road there ran through the Wazirabad assassination attempt (3 November 2022), where he was shot in the leg at a rally; his dramatic arrest at the Islamabad High Court on 9 May 2023, which triggered nationwide riots; and a cascade of cases — the Toshakhana (state gifts) conviction of August 2023, the cipher case, the Al-Qadir Trust case. More than 180 cases have been registered against him in total; several convictions have been suspended or overturned on appeal, but fresh charges have kept him in custody.

As of October 2026 he remains the PTI’s undisputed leader from behind bars. His health has become a national issue — his lawyers reported serious eye problems in early 2026, and a Supreme Court-ordered hospital transfer in August 2026 became its own controversy. On 4 October 2026 the PTI launched a long march from Lakki Marwat demanding his release, with the government sealing roads into Islamabad in response. Three years after his arrest, the question “when will Imran Khan be released?” still moves Pakistani politics more than any other.

The paradox of 2026 is that Khan is simultaneously the most constrained and most consequential politician in Pakistan. The PTI’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government — led by Chief Minister Sohail Afridi — governs in his name; the party’s backed independents were the largest bloc to emerge from the February 2024 election even as the PML-N took power; and every government decision, from IMF reviews to street policing, is weighed against his reaction. Jailed leaders usually fade. Khan, three years into Adiala, has not — which is precisely why his case files keep growing and his supporters keep marching.