Anxious Imran Khan fans stake out Lahore hospital, hope for PTI sympathy vote

Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who is challenging Pakistan’s established parties in Saturday’s general election, spent the last day of campaigning in hospital Thursday, after being injured at a rally Tuesday. But a tide of sympathy may benefit his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), according to supporters who flocked to the gates of the hospital Wednesday.

Two supporters brandish a PTI poster outside the Shaukat Hanum hospital Tony Cross/RFI

An anxious crowd has been waiting for news day and night outside the hospital, where doctors are tending to the head and spine injuries Khan suffered when he fell from a forklift during an election rally in Lahore.

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Audio report

Tony Cross in Lahore

Bouquets and handwritten messages to Khan festoon the outside wall of the Shaukat Hanum Memorial Hospital, where Yasir Mehmoud witnessed the accident.

“I was there at that time,” he recalls. “I saw him lively [sic] fall from the stage. I was just far away from15 feet. We feel very bad at that time.”

The hospital was built by Khan in 1994 after a fund-raising drive following his mother’s death from cancer – for his admirers, an example of the selflessness that makes him the right man to clean up Pakistani politics.

In this election, Khan’s PTI has become a major threat to President Asif Ali Zardari’s People’s Party (PPP), which led the outgoing government, and to Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PMLN), which hopes to win this time.

Millions of Pakistanis who have become disillusioned with the country’s notoriously corrupt political class have found a new interest in politics and are considering voting for him.

Thousands have attended the 63 rallies Khan has personally addressed, travelling to several in a single day by helicopter.

Many of his supporters are young professionals, like Naeem Rehman, who flew in from the UK to join Khan’s campaign.

“You can see a lot of passion from lots of people here,” he says. “We are wishing good luck and best health for our leader, Imran Khan. And insha’allah in three days’ time you will see a nya Pakistan, which is a new Pakistan, which is our slogan. He’s down but he’s not out!”

“They say that even a single person if he is determined, if he is working hard, can change the lives of many,” says Harris Adeel Mir, who has come from Dubai to vote for Khan. “It does not matter if he is alone, all the youngsters, all the people across Pakistan are supporting him.”

Khan first became famous as the captain of the national cricket team – that’s star status in south Asia.

His good looks and charisma haven’t done his change of career any harm and, even though he’s 60 and his party was formed in 1997, his supporters think of him as young and consider the PTI a new party untainted by the country’s notorious corruption.

Elisa, who works in a fashion house, has come with her three friends to put a bouquet of flowers at the hospital gate and take photos on their smartphones.

“That new Pakistan will be a Pakistan which is of the people, by the people, from the people, for the people and it will be a Pakistan which will promote equality and it will be a Pakistan where everybody’s views will be taken into account and given the same kind of importance,” she declares. “That is what our leader believes in and that’s what we believe in. And we’re totally with him on that.”

“… and we love you, Imran Khan!” trill her friends as Elisa stops her improvised speech.

The PTI’s problem is that it is pretty much a one-man show – Khan is the only member to have been elected an MP on the party’s ticket – and that man is down.

On Wednesday, party officials were assuring journalists that the leader would address a final rally in Islamabad. By Thursday, they had to admit that he would have to do so by video link from his hospital bed.

But sympathy for Khan’s injury may give the party a boost that conventional campaigning couldn’t have done.

“It should affect the campaign, it should,” says student Babr Hamid Khan Yazi. “The people should now open their eyes and should know that this is the right man.”

Sharif was certainly conscious of the danger.

He cancelled public rallies on Wednesday out of respect for Khan’s accident and on Thursday, declared that Pakistan should pull out of the US-led “war on terror”, a key PTI campaign demand that has not figured highly on the PMLN’s agenda until now.