Ehsaas

There is an Urdu word with no exact equivalent in English. Ehsaas is the moment another person’s suffering enters your conscience and refuses to leave, until you have done something about it.

In the early years of his campaign to build a cancer hospital, Imran Khan was handed five rupees by a woman who had almost nothing herself. He tried to return it. She refused. That small act contained a larger truth.

From Shaukat Khanum Hospital to Namal University; from twenty-two years in the political wilderness to the office of Prime Minister; from the creation of a welfare programme bearing the name Ehsaas to the prison cell in which he now sits, one thread runs through Imran Khan’s public life: an inability to look away.

Ehsaas traces that thread. It is the story of the golden boy of world cricket who encountered suffering and allowed it to change him; the political outsider who made human dignity central to his idea of the state; and the prisoner who continues to refuse the easier path when it requires surrendering what he believes he owes his people.

The book rests on the documented record — findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, the Lancet and the World Bank — and it does not spare its subject: a full chapter examines what he got wrong.

This is not simply the story of Imran Khan. It is the story of what one man came to believe he owed his country, and what a country may one day decide it owes him in return.

This digital edition is free. Readers who wish to give are asked to support the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital.