Islamabad [Pakistan]: Imran Khan has become the first Prime Minister of Pakistan to lose a no-trust vote in the National Assembly.
Despite several attempts to block the no-confidence motion here in the National Assembly, the voting took place after midnight in which as many as 174 members voted in favour of the motion in the 342-member House while members of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) were absent.
Notably, no Prime Minister has completed a full five-year tenure in Pakistan so far, according to reports.
The voting took place after a high political drama in the National Assembly with the Supreme Court overturning the decision of the Deputy Speaker to reject the opposition sponsored no-confidence motion against the ruling PTI-led coalition.
Imran Khan sought to link the opposition’s move to oust him through a no-trust vote with “foreign conspiracy” and named the United States in some of his speeches. However, the United States rejected his allegations. Imran Khan also gave calls for people to take to the streets while the joint opposition remained steadfast in its objective of defeating him.
Imran Khan Niazi is a former Pakistani cricketer, who after leading the country to victory in the 1992 World Cup Final, retired from cricket and joined politics. He is the founding Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
His political front, which he founded in 1997, remained on the sidelines of Pakistani politics until he found favour with the military establishment, which began propping him after 2013, to counter the growing political assertion of the two traditional mainstream parties led by Sharif and the Bhutto families.
The military establishment is widely known to have given its tacit approval to Khan in 2016 when he organised a massive rally and threatened a lockdown of Islamabad over the Panama Papers leak which had implicated the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The rally propped Khan as a serious contender for power, who enjoyed the blessings of the all-important Pakistani Army.
In 1997, he founded his own political party ‘Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. Khan contested for a National Assembly seat in October 2002 elections and served as a Member Parliament from NA- 71, Mianwali until 2007. In 2018, Imran Khan stormed to power in Pakistan by winning 176 votes.
Imran Khan, the seventh member of his family, was born on November 25, 1952, to a Pashtun family in Lahore, Pakistan. He attended Aitchison College in Lahore and later moved to Oxford for higher studies.
Hailing from a cricketing family, his cousins, Javed Burki and Majid Khan, both preceded him in going to Oxford and captaining Pakistan. Khan married Jemima Goldsmith, an English socialite, who converted to Islam on May 16, 1995, in Paris. The marriage ended in divorce after eight years in June 2004 as Jemima Khan was allegedly unable to adapt to Pakistani culture.
Khan started playing cricket at the age of 13. Initially playing for his college and later representing English county Worcester, he made his debut for Pakistan at the age of 18 during the 1971 English series at Birmingham. Soon, he acquired a permanent place in the team. Khan achieved the all-rounder’s triple in 75 tests.
His career came to an end after the first and only ODI World Cup victory for Pakistan in 1992 with a record of 3,807 runs and 362 wickets in Test cricket.
He founded Shaukat Khanum Memorial Trust in 1991, which actively worked on the research and development of cancer and other related diseases. He also founded the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research centre in 1994.
He passionately pursued healthcare interests in the wake of his mother’s untimely death, who died of cancer.
Khan was awarded ‘The Cricket Society Wetherall Award’ in 1976 and 1980 for being the leading all-rounder in English first-class cricket. He was also named as the Wisden Cricketer of the year in 1983 and received the ‘President’s Pride of Performance’ award in 1983.
He also got the Sussex Cricket Society Player of the Year Award in 1985 and served as Unicef’s Special Representative for Sports during the 1990s. Khan was inducted in the ‘ICC Hall of Fame’ on July 14, 2010.
