Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact. There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan. Every turn in a multifarious public life has abounded in fame, first as a cricket legend, then as a beloved philanthropist who built a cancer hospital for the poor, latterly as a maverick politician who swept to power promising reform, and now, as the sole occupant of a cell in Pakistan’s most notorious jail. So famous he’s been the subject of two death hoaxes – most recently in November, when he went unseen for so long that many concluded he had died.

There have been others with greater accomplishments. There may come others in the future. But in 78 years of Pakistan, in the pure currency of fame, of being known and recognised, of being talked about, of being the one Pakistani everyone can name, there is nobody beyond Imran. It holds even now, two years into the state’s attempts to erase him from public life. In that time, they’ve barred TV channels from taking his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture; they’ve even scrubbed him from the footage of his greatest sporting triumph.

In cricket-obsessed countries, it’s often said the PM’s job is second in difficulty only to the national team’s captaincy. Imran is the only person who can tell us for sure. He publicly arrived 50 years ago, delivering Pakistan a famous first cricket win in Australia. He did it in the sexiest, most masculine way the sport offers, by bowling very fast. He went on to become, unarguably, the greatest cricketer Pakistan has produced, leading them to their headiest triumphs. But his premiership was neither as successful nor as long-lasting as his captaincy, ending as every tenure preceding it has, incomplete – and often with its occupants under arrest or in jail.

That is where he has been since August 2023, the result of a toxic political fracture with the ruling authorities: a domineering military establishment with an emaciated civilian government in tow. This is a serious business with consequences for nearly 250 million people, but it has also played out like a nasty breakup: burn your ex’s photos in the hope of burning them from your heart.

An authoritarian government trying to vanish a popular political leader is hardly an unfamiliar tale. But it is a tall order in a digital age – and taller still when that leader happens to be the country’s most famous person, with a fame that long predates their political career.

Because no Pakistani can claim to be as widely and variously documented as Imran. He’s the subject, or author, of at least 10 English-language books. At his sporting peak, his face sold magazines; when he swanned about London’s social scene, he was a tabloid staple. By a rough estimate, he was on nearly a fifth of Pakistani cricket monthly covers in the 1980s. He was editor-in-chief of one of his own, Cricket Life International, in which his editorials became the first blinks of a political awakening. He has fronted advertising campaigns for some of the biggest brands in Pakistan – and even India, unthinkable for a Pakistani. It goes without saying that he has been commemorated in songs.

A former BBC journalist in Pakistan told me they came across 90 hours of audio and video footage in the archives while doing research for a feature when Imran became prime minister in 2018. That is, if you sat down on Monday morning and watched it all without stopping, you would only finish by the early hours of Friday. And that’s just the BBC archives.

No Pakistani has straddled as many spheres, or for as long. Imran was the country’s biggest cricket star when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. When the Berlin Wall fell, he was wearing tuxes and surrounded by women – like a Pakistani James Bond, without the spying and killing. By 9/11 he was a politician. When Covid hit, he was prime minister. Let the biographical wingspan of this fame sink in, already bulging in our analogue world, and now splayed all over our digital one.

As a result, over 50 years he has become ubiquitous, but also, in a way, omnipresent. Not only has Imran been a tangible presence – held in our hands, framed on our walls, boxed in on our TVs and scrolled down our devices – he has also been an incorporeal one, in our idolisation and aspiration, in our lust and disgust, our adoration and our grudges, in our prayers and curses.

So no, he can’t simply be wiped away. And yet, last November, he vanished so completely that it was reasonable to wonder if he had died, until one of his sisters was finally allowed to see him.

If it felt like a foretaste, it is because Pakistan has barely finished dealing with the aftertaste of the unnatural deaths of four of Imran’s predecessors. Aside from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by the generals who overthrew him, the deaths of Liaquat Ali Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto remain unsolved and unresolved. The most popular theories suspect military involvement. With that kind of history, this kind of ending can feel inevitable.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, there has been one single sighting of the most seen and visible man in Pakistan’s history. Imran is pulling a hard resting bitch face in the screenshot, which was leaked from a video hearing in jail and instantly went viral, rattling authorities so much that it led to a swift inquiry and swifter suspensions, giving a light trace of the contours of this battle, as well as a sense of its scale: that trying to erase Imran might feel like trying to erase the sky.

On 9 May 2023, a year after he was removed as prime minister, Imran was arrested on corruption charges. He would be released on bail within days, but not before the arrest sparked rioting across the country, with anger directed squarely at the army. A few days later, stunned and stung by the reaction, senior military officials summoned owners of major media organisations, publishers, news directors and anchors to a meeting in Islamabad.

When I met one person who was at that meeting, they asked me to turn off my recorder before we talked about it. We were overlooking Islamabad’s Constitution Avenue – a wishful bit of road not far from D-Chowk, the square that has hosted some of Pakistan’s – and Imran’s – biggest protests. “We were told that Imran’s name and images should not be on TV,” the attendee said. “Told expressly and expressively.”

A couple of days later, these instructions were reiterated in an official directive issued by Pakistan’s media regulator. Without mentioning Imran or PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party he had founded in 1996), the order barred channels from giving airtime to 9 May’s “hate mongers, rioters, their facilitators and perpetrators”.

The compliance by broadcast media was immediate. Imran had dominated the news in the year since being removed from office – and now he suddenly disappeared. Coverage of rallies agitating against his removal – ordinarily gold dust for 24/7 news channels – ceased. His name was scrubbed clean off the air. News readers, anchors and tickers began referring to him as “Bani PTI” – the PTI leader.

Asad Umar, a minister in Imran’s government who had himself been briefly arrested, was invited on to a current affairs show soon after the official orders went out. He wasn’t sure whether he’d be allowed to talk freely. “I said [to the anchor]: ‘Are you sure you can interview me and air what I say?’”, he recalled to me over a Zoom call from his Karachi home. Umar carried on as normal, speaking about Imran, “and in the first break, [the anchor] said: ‘Bro, you’ll get me killed, you’ve said Imran’s name 17 times!’”

One well-known anchor on ARY news used Imran’s name and then immediately checked himself and said: “I apologise… the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf.” The same channel blurred Imran out of a photo from a meeting he had with IMF officials. The most absurd contortion came from Imran’s former employers, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). When they released a video celebrating Pakistan’s greatest cricket triumphs, including footage of the side that Imran captained to victory in the 1992 World Cup, Imran had been cut out entirely – on instruction from the PCB chairman (a political appointee). Zaka Ashraf was not acting on directives from above, though, according to a PCB official I spoke with. He just read the room and thought it the expedient thing to do. After intense blowback, the board were forced to release an updated version with Imran fleetingly restored. “Due to its length,” they explained, “the video was abridged and some important clips were missing.”

Newspapers and publications did not fold quite as homogenously, in part because of the dwindling relevance of print media in Pakistan. But the instructions were clear: no photographs of Imran, no headlines with his name. “I returned to a very different landscape,” one newspaper editor, who had gone on holiday before Imran’s arrest, told me. “Reality had changed, within two weeks.”

Urdu newspapers, with bigger circulations, took implementation more strictly – “to a degree it is instruction, after which it is equal parts fear and equal parts being more loyal than the king,” as the editor put it. Punchier publications got away with tiny rebellions, like a front-page photo of a protester holding a poster of Imran. The blows to press freedom were one thing, but there were more prosaic editorial niggles, too: how many different ways can you headline a story about Imran without using his name?

Especially as, once he was rearrested in August 2023, his trials became an active story. Reportage of these was controlled at source, with only a handful of journalists allowed into closed hearings, held inside jail. Initially, Imran could interact with them. But by the time his words dripped down to the wider press pool, past the on-site reporter’s filters of newsworthiness and self-censorship, they were, according to the editor, inevitably “squeezed of their essence”. After a while, partitions were put up between the media and Imran to impede their interactions. Eventually a judge ordered Imran to stop making incendiary comments, and the media to stop reporting them.

By the time the national elections were approaching in February 2024, it had become common, one broadcaster told me, for journalists to slip phones under their thighs – or turn on Spotify – when they discussed Imran, even in private. Imran was in jail and disqualified from running, and the media were hit by an expanded edict not to display PTI’s flag, or even identify PTI candidates as such. Instead, they were categorised as independents.

A month before voting, the Supreme Court upheld the Election Commission’s ban on PTI’s electoral symbol, a cricket bat – an old ruse in a country with low literacy rates where people identify candidates through symbols. Despite this, and other credible allegations of rigging, PTI’s independents won the most seats of any party, though not enough to form a government. Had Imran had not been hidden from sight – if he had been visible, campaigning and rallying – the PTI might well have won an outright majority.

For a generation that remembers Imran before politics, his galvanising rhetoric, which has spooked the establishment, will never not be surprising. As a cricketer, he was diffident in public, his oratory exemplified in the underwhelming speech he delivered after winning the 1992 World Cup (in which he forgot to thank his teammates). It’s impossible to reconcile that awkward presence with the demagogue he is now, able to summon a furious, barracking righteousness on stage, and draw a visceral energy from the crowd like only a handful ever have in Pakistan.

His deployment of language, in particular, has been revelatory. There’s a rich history of political slogans in Pakistan, but the modern era is dominated by Imranisms that have spread like viruses through the population – Tabdeeli (Change), Naya Pakistan (new Pakistan), “Go Nawaz Go”, to pick but three. One constitutional expert put it to me that Imran’s ability to infuse words with new meanings embodied the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

My own slightly more lowbrow take is that he is now reaping the benefits of his TV slog years in the mid-2000s. The party was then irrelevant electorally, but Pakistan was experiencing a media boom, with a flood of new channels happily providing him a nightly soapbox. There he perfected a repertoire of soundbites and catchphrases around the more reductive – and popular – tentpoles of his politics: opposition to corruption and dynastic politics, criticism of US interference (which he blamed for terrorist militancy in Pakistan), self-sufficiency, and reorienting Pakistan as an Islamic welfare state. He was stress-testing himself on a captive audience while also energising his urban middle-class – and hitherto politically latent – base.

Whatever the answer, it explains why the state doesn’t want him seen or heard. To that end, putting him in a 6ft by 8ft cell in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, serving two sentences – 14 and 17 years (consecutively) – for corruption, is perfect. Plenty of other cases are pending, but it’s not too cynical to suggest that the Pakistan judicial system will not ultimately decide whether – or how long – he stays inside.

He is isolated, in an eight-cell complex split into two rows facing each other across an open-air corridor. The remaining seven cells are empty, save for one used as a kitchen, where another prisoner cooks Imran’s food. Another houses his books which, at one point last year, included Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Oriana Fallaci’s Interviews with History and Power, as well as volumes on Rumi, the Ottoman Empire and Henry Kissinger.

In Islamabad last July I met Faisal Fareed Chaudhry, who had been, until earlier that year, a senior member of Imran’s legal team. His brother Fawad was a minister in Imran’s government. There’s some sourness around the situation of the services Chaudhry now offers, but he remains a staunch defender of Imran.

Chaudhry told me Imran was in a “death cell”, though it wasn’t clear whether he was speaking literally or figuratively. There were basic facilities, such as a TV, two newspapers (Dawn and The Express Tribune) and books. Access to visitors was broadly restrictive and tightly controlled. Initially, Imran was allowed weekly meetings with family members and separately with party leaders and lawyers. These often ran long: his eldest cousin, Jamshed Burki, went along once, and they spent an hour talking about historical battles.

He had access to a bigger audience in his hearings, which took place in a makeshift courtroom in what is otherwise the jail’s community hall (or, as described by Chaudhry, “like that room in Shawshank Redemption where they watch movies”). Some of these, with other defendants and legal teams attending, could end up with nearly 100 people present, and stretch late into the evening, a peculiar bonus. “It gave Imran five to seven hours with so many people, and he really enjoyed that,” his sister Aleema Khan told me.

But all this is dependent on the political mood outside. By the time I was reporting in Pakistan last summer, Imran’s jailers had taken away his newspapers and books, and sharply limited his visitors. There were no hearings, and he was only allowed to see two of his sisters, Uzma and Noreen Khan, under strict supervision. Aleema had been prevented from meeting him, because she had become his messenger, conveying instructions to the party and briefing the media.

In November all meetings were stopped, because the government complained Imran was using his visitors to stay active in politics (in December a government spokesperson told Sky News that Imran had met his sisters 137 times in around 112 weeks). For nearly a month, nobody outside of jail staff saw or heard from Imran. His sisters and supporters camped outside Adiala demanding access, frenzied speculation coiled itself around #WhereisImranKhan? on social media, leading into rumours of his death – even throwing up a prominent nearly-obituary – and into a blizzard of mainstream coverage. By the time his sister Uzma was allowed to meet him and assure everyone he was physically fine, his disappearance had made him more visible than he had been for months.

Which reminded me of the popular idiom Chaudhry had used: “Aankh ojhal, Pahaar ojhal.” (“Hidden from the eye, even a mountain disappears.”) “They think if he’s not in front of people’s eyes, they’ll forget him. They are wrong.”

If history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, in Pakistan it needs the military’s permission to do so. Their backing is the Faustian pact all politicians must reckon with, and the reason no prime minister has completed a full term. And so, in a way, Imran’s current fate was foretold the day he entered politics in 1996, with the explicit support of Hamid Gul, a former spymaster.

When a parliamentary vote of no-confidence dismissed Imran as prime minister in April 2022, the mode of dismissal was a first for Pakistan. But the mechanisms of power were as old as time. Imran’s relationship with the military leadership – they were widely acknowledged to have helped him to victory in the 2018 elections – had ruptured. The details hardly matter – rumoured ego clashes, ructions over military appointments and sackings – as much as the fact that, in the long arc of retrospect, this was inevitable.

As prime minister, his government ran as a powershare situationship with the military, who controlled the big-picture agenda while civilians sweated the small stuff. It was commonly labelled a “hybrid regime”, a newish, cutesy bit of wordplay that, in truth, describes most democratic phases in Pakistan.

Imran promised to end corruption in 90 days, but Pakistan’s ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption index fell under him. The economy plummeted, rose and fell again; there were achievements (a free health insurance programme for the underprivileged, a large-scale afforestation plan) and there were disappointments (an IMF bailout, vindictive targeting of opponents masquerading as accountability drives); much of a muchness, in truth, with governments past.

Back in the 2010s, in opposition Imran twice led anti-government marches to the capital, where thousands of supporters staged sit-ins for months on end. These dharnas were the making of him – politics done as a throbbing, heaving carnival, Imran its ringmaster railing against rigged elections (in 2014) and corruption (in 2016). When he was removed in 2022, he responded in signature style, with two long marches.

The system, in equally time-honoured fashion, responded by burying him in court cases. Most were spurious, like the iddat case, which alleged that Imran’s third marriage to Bushra Maneka came too soon after her divorce as per Islamic law. There were also corruption cases, most significantly one about a land deal involving the country’s biggest real estate baron, and another about the improper sale of state gifts – it was in these two cases that he was convicted and handed a total of 31 years in prison.

Pakistan convulsed. When Imran survived an assassination attempt during the second of his long marches, in November 2022, he cranked up the heat by publicly accusing senior military officials of trying to kill him. When the police tried to arrest Imran at home in leafy, cloistered Zaman Park in March 2023, they were thwarted by an army of his supporters. After the siege, Imran posed for a photo with hundreds of tear-gas shells that had been fired at his home: a shock even to Pakistanis, who are not unused to urban violence.

On 9 May 2023 – one of those wild days Pakistan undergoes periodically, when nobody’s sure if they’re witnessing an accidental bin fire or a celebratory bonfire – Imran was at Islamabad High Court for a hearing in the Al-Qadir Trust, the land deal case.¹ Taking no chances, a phalanx of Rangers, one of the army’s paramilitary forces, smashed through the windows of a courtroom to get in and arrest him. In footage from the scene, Imran looks bored: his cheek resting on his palm, though it’s hard to say whether this was an affectation of cool or genuine calm.

The Rangers are not a light-touch force, and in the melee that ensued, Imran claimed he had been roughed up. As they walked him to a waiting pick-up, the escort was certainly not delicate. But the scene’s symbolism could not be more resonant had his supporters created it. Imran, in his white shalwar kameez, standing out in this overwhelming moshpit of black; Imran, unsheathed, against the state’s armoured might; Imran against the world.

After the arrest he was handed over to NAB, Pakistan’s anti-corruption agency. I was told by an official with knowledge of the day that the arresting officers had to be reminded that they must not take selfies with their prisoner. They told me that officers were in awe at the results of his medical check: expecting to find signs of the day’s toll on a 70-year-old man, they instead found his heartbeat was as if he’d been at rest all day. When another called his wife to tell her he’d be late because of the captive, she told him just to make sure Imran came to no harm.

He didn’t, though the same could not be said of Pakistan. Since his removal, Imran had ramped up his invective against the military leadership. And on 9 May, his supporters unleashed a thunderclap of anger at the military. They attacked several military installations and ransacked the home of a senior general, forcing troops to come out, restore order and begin an immediate crackdown on the PTI.

Imran’s freedom was shortlived. Three months later, on 5 August, he was arrested again. This affair was relatively timid. Police forced their way past security and into his Zaman Park home. Imran appeared, irritated and angry, his wife Bushra with him and in the mood for confrontation, one of the officers at the scene told me. “She tried to talk but I said to her, ‘Sister, we have to take Khan saab, there is no argument with you,’” the officer said. She tried again and was told again, more firmly, to stay out of it.

The officer, in plain clothes, sensed trouble, sent the others out and approached Imran with two options. Really, it was one: come quietly now, dignity intact, or let the uniformed guys take over, who won’t be polite. Imran, as the officer put it, was kind enough to oblige.

Dressed in a blue polo shirt, black tracksuit bottoms, trainers and no handcuffs, Imran walked into a car to be taken to Lahore airport, and from there to Rawalpindi’s Attock jail. This is the last photograph of him on the outside; maybe the last ever such picture. He is in its foreground, inside the car. Next to him is Deputy Inspector General Liaqat Malik, who led the operation. Malik poses, full-cheeked, smiling pleasantly. Imran sits, puffy-eyed and inscrutable, perched somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford on the craggily handsome scale. Aesthetically, it is an unremarkable photograph, revealing little of the momentousness of the occasion. It’s crying out for a black-and-white filter, or a sepia tint; any nod to the burden of history it bears.

Pakistani leaders wear this kind of darkening as a badge of honour.² Indeed, one way of reading Imran’s predicament is as a composite of the various silencing tactics that most of them have experienced: jail time (the Sharifs and Bhuttos), airtime bans (Altaf Hussain, a firebrand regional politician, and Nawaz Sharif – under Imran’s government), attempts to wipe out archives (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s, ordered by Zia-ul-Haq); newspapers censured for carrying photos of opponents (of Benazir, again in the Zia years, which represent a censorship bingo card).

But these methods have rarely felt more sluggish and misdirected than against Imran, because nobody in Pakistan has – or has ever had – as vast a digital footprint. So even as Imran has been physically hidden, he is still abundant in the online world – the political terrain he was first to conquer. He was derided as Facebook Khan back in the 2000s, when his promises to break the status quo and fight corruption, his woolly vision of an Islamic welfare state and his post-9/11 critiques of the US, struck a chord with younger demographics who recalled his pre-politics fame and credibility. But until the 2013 elections, it didn’t win votes, and he was widely mocked as a politician who appealed mostly to the diaspora and a small, urban crowd.

What changed thereafter was not so much the message – the core of which has remained consistent – but the medium, which became a bigger part of public life. Imran’s political personhood needed a world to inhabit and grow in, one the PTI had been busy building from the start: even before social media, they were running membership campaigns and fundraising online, with a vast supporter database and an archive of digital videos. At that time, nobody recognised that this was the kind of first-movers’ advantage that would help them win power; fewer still could have guessed that, when Imran vanished, it would be the key to rematerialising him.

Four months after Imran was last seen as a free man, with elections imminent and the PTI barred from campaigning, the party revealed a new digital weapon: a virtual Imran. At the end of a five-hour “virtual rally” streaming on YouTube, an old clip of Imran appeared but with an AI-generated voice, addressing his followers in a new four-minute speech.

It was a delicious subversion. Once mocked for being an online party, the PTI had turned it around to mock the efforts to disappear them: more than a million people watched the rally on YouTube.

Jibran Ilyas, the PTI’s digital head, told me about the process of recreating Imran’s voice. The words for the speech came from notes Imran gave to his lawyers, and then Ilyas, who worked closely enough with Imran to be familiar with his syntax, built it out with volunteers. “If you’ve ever been in a writer’s room, this was like that. Everyone comes together, there’s a number of drafts, we give a final version to the lawyers and say, is this OK?”

The voice was built using real samples of Imran’s old speeches, but Ilyas and his team went through 50 iterations before settling on a final version. Artificial Imran’s baritone is familiar, but in a dead-inside kind of way. If the messaging is on point, the intonation is off and so too, often, is the accent. On this evidence, AI doomers have little to fear, though Ilyas reckoned – optimistically – that this first effort was “65% accurate”. The software, ElevenLabs, cost USD $99.

There have been more AI Imran videos since, including one in English that sounds like Imran spoofing Imran, in a strange hybrid accent. But they haven’t needed more, because of the endless supply of clips that he had already recorded. It is testament to the team’s foresight that these rarely appear outdated. “We always knew when Imran Khan gets arrested we would have enough content to run forever,” Ilyas told me. “We needed to make sure he was current, so you’ll see relevant 30-second clips every day. And because he’s been in the public eye so long, he has spoken about every imaginable subject.”

These were perfect for TikTok, which Imran joined weeks before his arrest, and where his first video has clocked up more than 365 million views. TikTok’s video-first orientation has thrust Imran deeper and wider into the country, far beyond the urban crowd that uses Facebook and X. But X remained his go-to platform, because it allowed him to react to events almost in real time.

So much so that, last July, Adiala jail authorities were compelled to point out – in a statement defending the conditions of his confinement, but also, presumably, in frustration – that he had tweeted 413 times since his arrest. Each post was a slick little operation, dictated to his sisters and lawyers, put out in separate Urdu and English versions, with graphics as often as possible, and the right hashtags.

The party’s digital team don’t like revealing staffing numbers, partly because the military ruthlessly targeted them. But it’s also impossible to know, because the line between worker, fan and disciple is nebulous. Farhan Virk, an online troll with no paid portfolio, became one of the party’s most influential figures; another senior digital position was filled by a fan who posted a viral tweet during the ‘Fontgate’ scandal that helped bring down the government of Nawaz Sharif in 2017. (TL;DR: a 2006 document was proven to be fake because it used a Calibri font that wasn’t commercially available until 2007, but I’d strongly advise looking it up through its memes.)

The “huge majority” of Imran content, according to Ilyas, is from people with no official ties to the party. They may not even be PTI supporters. They’re in it purely for Imran, seeing in him an image of what they aspire to, or, in one of the lives he has lived, a life they want to live. They choose their Imran poison accordingly: remembering the champion cricketer, envying the 1980s bachelor, celebrating the philanthropist, cheering on the opposition crusader, defending the populist prime minister, platforming the incarcerated. How do you wipe out a multiverse of user-generated content?

For its part, the state mostly adheres to that law of the instrument whereby if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail. The arrests of members of the party’s digital team were predictable. The arrests of several ordinary citizens for posting pro-Imran – or anti-army – content in the aftermath of 9 May were a stark warning to the wider population.

Control over the internet was tightened immediately after that day, and continued well beyond the 2024 elections. A recent report by Amnesty on censorship in Pakistan logged 24 incidents of internet shutdowns in 2024, including the blocking and throttling (slowing) of specific sites. “In the lead-up to the 2024 general election, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and X were throttled on multiple occasions when… PTI held virtual rallies.” Soon after the elections, X was banned on the pretext of national security, only to open again during the military confrontation with India in May last year. 

“Everything that has happened – all policy and law-making – has been Imran-focused,” a digital rights expert told me. They also pointed out that internet censorship had worsened under Imran’s own government; Amnesty counted 77 internet shutdowns in all from 2016 to 2024.

When I met Imran’s sister Aleema last July, she began our conversation with a bristling takedown of the notion that Imran had vanished. She sat me down in a corner of her living room, like an errant schoolboy, and scolded me for 15 minutes. She’d had a tough day, having been prevented from meeting Imran, but family members told me later that she doesn’t always need a reason. The gist was that it was ridiculous to suggest Imran had disappeared because he was all around us, at the centre of public life.

We were in Bani Gala, a once wild and remote locality on the edges of Rawal Lake, but now populated enough to count as a suburb of Islamabad. It is known mostly because of Imran, who has lived there since the turn of the century. He calls his villa, secluded atop a hill, his retreat. Aleema and two other sisters have built homes around his, on the slope down, as if standing guard.

Aleema’s emergence since Imran’s arrest as a de facto leader has been intriguing. She denies any political ambition other than releasing her brother. But twice last year rifts between her and senior PTI members surfaced, leading to their resignations. And speculation about the friction between the sisters and Imran’s wife, Bushra – important to his politics – is not wild. (A family member asked me, acerbically, if Bushra was being poisoned, as she claimed last year, why hadn’t she died yet?)

Aleema was dutybound to say Imran hadn’t disappeared, but she wasn’t wrong. In their own statement, Adiala jail authorities – without naming Imran – protested that he had “made headlines” 145 times since August 2024 and “interacted with 10 international media channels including the Telegraph, Reuters, WSJ, Fox News and other[s]”.

When I was in Pakistan in July, Imran was very much in the news, because he’d been stripped of his privileges and intra-party disputes were roiling. By then the red lines around his mentions were blurring. I watched a current affairs show on which one anchor used Imran’s name while the other still referred to him as Bani PTI.

Some outlets had clawed back little freedoms. In many cases, they had no choice, because it was impossible to prevent his ubiquity on social media from bleeding through to old media. Nobody hid their phones when talking about him anymore, though some still lowered their voices. The majority of people I spoke to still preferred speaking anonymously in order to speak openly. When rumours of his death peaked in November last year, most TV channels and newspapers referred to him by name (though not always in headlines).

Empirically, his popularity has not diminished. One pollster I spoke with said Imran’s personal approval ratings had remained robust in private polling – in the early-60s, percentage-wise – through elections, his arrest, the incarceration and the India-Pakistan conflict. That put him 10-15 points ahead of any of his rivals. And even though PTI came second in an official Gallup poll right after the four-day conflict with India, no one I spoke to doubted that, were elections held now, Imran would win.

When he was put in jail, he was assigned the prisoner number 804. Not long afterwards, the number started popping up on car registration plates (one TikToker was arrested for driving with an IK-804 plate). The number was put to song (most famously by Malkoo). It turned up as graffiti. It was chanted at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium during big cricket games: “Tera yaar, mera yaar, Qaidi no. 804!” (“Your friend, my friend, prisoner no. 804” – with the rhyme on “chaar”, Urdu for four). A Peshawari sandal maker put the number on one of his designs and it became his best-seller. In Leicester and Jeddah, you could dine at 804-named restaurants. At a takeaway in Birmingham, you could order the Special 804 Biryani. The very marker of his captivity became its own kind of freedom.

Asad Umar, the former PTI minister, told me about a mountain trek he undertook on holiday in northern Pakistan. It took two hours to get to the top, where stood a little café with good tea and great views. Once there, staff told him a man had followed some distance behind and wanted to meet him.

“He had an ektara (a one-stringed instrument). [He said:] ‘Ek cheez aapko sunaana chahta hoon’ (‘I’d like to play you something’). He’d made a song about Qaidi no 804 and he sang it to me and my wife. And then promptly went back down.” He had trekked all the way up, Umar repeated, just for Imran. He probably recognised the sentiment. A decade earlier, Umar joined the PTI when he was a renowned corporate figure with no political background. Not for the party or the manifesto, he told me. Just Imran.

There’s more out there – the jail officials detained for helping Imran by passing on messages, the cricketer Aamer Jamal handed a large fine for writing 804 on his hat, and maybe one of those NAB officials did sneak in a selfie – so much, in fact, that it’s difficult to disagree with Umar, partisan as he is. “Imran was 6ft-plus tall when he was prime minister. Pushing him out doubled that. Putting him in jail made him 18ft. What more do you want? Make him 24ft?”

Last October, Imran turned 73. For perspective, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was 51 when he was executed, and Benazir Bhutto was 54 when she was assassinated. The PTI and its supporters don’t like talking about it, but a future beyond Imran is unavoidable. They don’t like it because that future is not visible. In Imran’s absence, the party has turned on itself. Under pressure, older members have quit. Foot soldiers feel abandoned and lost. Mistrust is rife and factions emergent. There’s dark talk of establishment-backed forces rupturing it from within.

Imran has no obvious successor, certainly not his sons, Sulaiman and Kasim – not because they are not inclined, but because opposition to dynastic politics is one of his first principles. That is how he differentiated himself and his party from the Bhuttos and Sharifs. We are not like that. Right about now, it might’ve been handy if they were.

The other reason they don’t like talking about it is because it drives home the uncomfortable truth: the PTI isn’t really a party. The party is Imran. The ideology is Imran. People joined for Imran. People voted for Imran. The military banked on Imran. It always was Imran and will remain Imran, until there is no Imran. He is its life, and also its sunset clause.

All of which is to conveniently arrive at a theme that has draped itself around Imran forever, but especially in these jail years: his physicality, and its centrality to his appeal and the calculations to disappear him. It manifests in different ways, but nearly every account from those who had met him in jail, made a point – usually unprompted – of how fit he is looking. How jail has turned him into an athlete again. How he spends a couple of hours each day working out. He had a slight paunch towards the end of his premiership and didn’t like it. Now, with time on his hands, he’d lost it, and was fitter than ever. One of the first privileges his lawyers secured was an exercise bike and a set of 12kg weights (not 10kg, Aleema corrected me).

This gaze was natural when he was an athlete, and even then he was feted as a specimen apart. But as his political career has progressed, so has he leaned into the idea that being physically stronger makes him a better man and leader. For example, when preparing for a long march in 2016, he did 50 push-ups in front of party workers (note to the Beatles: that’s what he did when he was 64) while criticising Nawaz Sharif and his “motu [chubby] gang”. Not many world leaders can have as extensive an archive of workout videos or images.

A mythology of invulnerability has grown around him. I was reminded by party workers, for example, of how quickly he recovered after fracturing his back falling off a stage at an election rally in 2013. When he was shot three years ago, multiple witnesses stressed that he was the calmest man in the melee. Despite being struck on the shin, he insisted that he would not come out of the bus on a stretcher. He wanted to be upright in front of his supporters. A few months ago, social media erupted with claims that Imran had skipped a hearing because he was working out. It wasn’t true, but it was telling because it spoke to his perceived superiority in a very specific way. Look – he’s defeating them by lifting weights.

It reinforces how impossible it is to engage with Imran without reckoning for his physical self and the effect it has on people – whether supporters, opponents or those in between. And much as his party might lean into an online Imran or an AI Imran, or recycle an old Imran, it can never match Imran in the here and now.

Perhaps this is also the truth that the establishment, for all their clumsy and lumbering ways, have stumbled to – that this is the contest. That, at 73, and no matter how healthy and strong Imran is, it might be as simple as waiting. Let him have his online fiefdom, no matter how much it trespasses into real life. Let him be manifested however his people want. Let him be one of those leaders whose ideas and legacy live on beyond them.

Because for all that social media has influenced elections and changed politics – and AI might go even further in doing so – this oldest of human activities plays out on a daily basis in flesh-and-blood acts of humans choosing humans. Physically removing any part of that, therefore, remains the surest way to influence elections and change politics. Even if it remains impossible for the establishment to erase the sky, it is sufficient for them to merely draw the curtains.

We’re not quite there with Imran just yet, even if several people close to him recognise that he is resigned to his captivity. The dispute with the army is increasingly tumourous. After his sister Uzma finally met him in November, his X account posted more sharp criticism of the military establishment. They retaliated with an ominous briefing in which the head of the ISPR, their media wing, called Imran a “narcissist”, “mentally unwell” and a “security risk”. He spoke for more than an hour without once mentioning Imran’s name.

Even otherwise intimations of mortality abound, including a fake press release last summer about his death. And aside from the attempt on his life at the rally in 2022, Imran has alleged other plans to eliminate him. A month before the shooting, his helicopter malfunctioned and made a tricky emergency landing. Aleema alleged sabotage. Right on cue, though, the party released footage of Imran, swag undisturbed, calmly walking away and going to talk to some kids playing cricket.

Where we are, however, is undoubtedly amid the turbulence of the creation of another Imran. Perhaps this is the point at which the longer Imran is unseen, the more his supporters see and invest in him something that they wouldn’t invest in a worldly being; something they would only invest in a murshid. And perhaps this will be the final Imran, the one for whom it won’t matter whether he gets out of jail, or whether we see him again; the Imran in whose shade all other Imrans will come and rest.

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.

1. In broad outline, Imran and his wife set up a trust while he was PM, which received land worth billions of rupees from Malik Riaz, Pakistan’s biggest property tycoon. The case alleged that the land, which was for a university they wanted to build, was part of a quid pro quo arrangement that would see £190 million of Riaz’s dirty money, seized in the UK by the National Crime Agency and due to be returned to the Pakistan government, instead going towards a separate legal fine imposed on Riaz. Imran’s supporters outright dismiss the claim, but it is the most credible of all he faces.
2. In Press in Chains (1986), Zamir Niazi stoically and meticulously charts press censorship in Pakistan. The book is timeless, especially if read from the vantage point of the targets of censorship. Those attempts date back even to Jinnah, and his historic, foundational address to Pakistan’s first assembly on August 11, 1947. This is, to be clear, a long, inglorious tradition.