Political work



Khan entered electoral politics after few years after the end of his professional cricketing career. Since then, his most significant political work has been to bring awareness towards the lack of justice in Pakistan.
 This movement to bring justice was coupled with awareness in media and harassment of judiciary by President Pervez Musharaf. The public, with the help of lawyers, NGOs and other major political parties, including Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, fought a battle on the roads, getting judiciary eventually restored in its much improved (impartial)form . Initially, Imran Khan's politics were not taken seriously in Pakistan. However, his popularity has sharply risen, especially among women and the youth of Pakistan, after the repeated bad governance by the government and interference by US. Recently, Imran Khan has been the only politician who has responded to terrorism allegations on Pakistan. While Khan is viewed as a fundamentalist by some political circles, he has suggested solutions for helping US and NATO forces to fight terrorism while at the same time, not creating more terrorists in Pakistan^[31]. Imran Khan is sometimes viewed as a stubborn politician who does not involve others in decision making. However, Imran Khan has openly denied this allegation and claimed that the level of democracy in the executive committee meeting of his party (PTI) is unmatched by any other political party in Pakistan. While many people seem hopeless about Imran's political victory in Pakistan, he has known to someone possessing high level of determination and perseverance, as demonstrated by his cricket and philanthropic career. His political popularity is rising quickly in Pakistan and although the party has only one seat in 2002 elections and kept out of elections in 2008, resulting in no representation in Parliament, Imran Khan is considered as the one of the four major political leaders in Pakistan, especially by mainstream media (others being Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain).
On 25 April 1996, Khan founded his own political party called the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) with a proposed slogan of "Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem."^[7] Khan, who contested from 7 districts, and members of his party were universally defeated at the polls in the 1997 general elections. Khan supported General Pervez Musharraf's military coup in 1999, but denounced his presidency a few months before the 2002 general elections. Many political commentators and his opponents termed Khan's change in opinion an opportunistic move. "I regret supporting the referendum. I was made to understand that when he won, the general would begin a clean-up of the corrupt in the system. But really it wasn't the case," he later explained.^[32] During the 2002 election season, he also voiced his opposition to Pakistan's logistical support of US troops in Afghanistan by claiming that their country had become a "servant of America."^[32] PTI won 0.8% of the popular vote and one out of 272 open seats on the 20 October 2002 legislative elections. Khan, who was elected from the NA-71 constituency of Mianwali, was sworn in as an MP on 16 November.^[33]. As an MP, he was part of the Standing Committees on Kashmir and Public Accounts, and expressed legislative interest in Foreign Affairs, Education and Justice.^[34]
On 6 May 2005, Khan became one of the first Muslim figures to criticize a 300-word Newsweek story about the alleged desecration of the Qur'an in a U.S. military prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Khan held a press conference to denounce the article and demanded that Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from American president George W. Bush for the incident.^[35] In 2006, he exclaimed, "Musharraf is sitting here, and he licks George Bush’s shoes!" Criticizing Muslim leaders supportive of the Bush administration, he added, "They are the puppets sitting on the Muslim world. We want a sovereign Pakistan. We do not want a president to be a poodle of George Bush."^[16] During George W. Bush's visit to Pakistan in March 2006, Khan was placed under house arrest in Islamabad after his threats of organizing a protest.^[7] In June 2007, the federal Parliamentary Affairs Minister Dr. Sher Afghan Khan Niazi and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party filed separate ineligibility references against Khan, asking for his disqualification as member of the National Assembly on grounds of immorality. Both references, filed on the basis of articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of Pakistan, were rejected on 5 September.^[36]
On 2 October 2007, as part of the All Parties Democratic Movement, Khan joined 85 other MPs to resign from Parliament in protest of the Presidential election scheduled for 6 October, which General Musharraf was contesting without resigning as army chief.^[4] On 3 November 2007, Khan was put under house arrest at his father's home hours after President Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan. Khan had demanded the death penalty for Musharraf after the imposition of emergency rule, which he equated to "committing treason". The next day, on 4 November, Khan escaped and went into peripatetic hiding.^[37] He eventually came out of hiding on 14 November to join a student protest at the University of the Punjab.^[38] At the rally, Khan was captured by students from the Jamaat-i-Islami political party, who claimed that Khan was an uninvited nuisance at the rally, and they handed him over to the police, who charged him under the Anti-terrorism act for allegedly inciting people to pick up arms, calling for civil disobedience, and for spreading hatred.^[39] Incarcerated in the Dera Ghazi Khan Jail, Khan's relatives had access to him and were able to meet him to deliver goods during his week-long stay in jail. On 19 November, Khan let out the word through PTI members and his family that he had begun a hunger strike but the Deputy Superintendent of Dera Ghazi Khan Jail denied this news, saying that Khan had bread, eggs and fruit for breakfast.^[40] Khan was one of the 3,000 political prisoners released from imprisonment on 21 November 2007.^[41]
His party boycotted the national elections on 18 February 2008 and hence, no member of PTI has served in Parliament since Khan's resignation in 2007. Despite no longer being a member of Parliament, Khan was placed under house arrest in the crackdown by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari of anti-government protests on 15 March 2009.
In April 2011, Khan lead protests over the drone attacks in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. He and his protesters stayed on the streets overnight to show solidarity with the victims of these drone attacks by the US Military.^{[citation needed]}