How Pakistan’s History Of Coups And Assassinations Shapes The Silence Around Imran Khan

Last Updated:November 29, 2025, 15:30 IST

Pakistan has lived through versions of this moment before: leaders removed by force or violence, governments toppled, and a military establishment that outlasts them all.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party supporters carry a poster of their leader and former Prime Minister Imran Khan. (AFP)

Pakistan’s present crisis over Imran Khan’s whereabouts may feel unprecedented, but its contours are achingly familiar: a jailed civilian leader, an information vacuum, rumours of elimination, and a state apparatus unwilling to offer even basic transparency.

As rumours swirl that the former prime minister has been tortured, gravely injured or killed inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail, the country is not encountering something new; it is revisiting the oldest script in its political playbook, where civilian leaders are weakened, isolated or eliminated while the military power structure remains intact.

For days, Pakistani authorities have denied the rumours, yet refused to produce Khan in public, even as his sisters say they were pushed, beaten and dragged outside Adiala when they sought permission to see him. Their appeals for access have only deepened the sense that something is being concealed.

That anxiety rests not just on speculation, but on Khan’s own words. In 2024, he warned from jail that “if anything happens to me", Pakistan’s army chief must be held accountable. In a May op-ed in The Telegraph, he accused the military establishment under Asim Munir of using “every tactic" to erase his party from national politics and wrote that Munir would bear responsibility if any harm befell him or his wife. “All that is left for them is to now murder me… I would prefer death over slavery," he declared, a message that now loops back into the present panic.

This is not hysteria. It is historical memory. Pakistan is a country where no prime minister has ever completed a full term, where coups have repeatedly decided the fate of governments, and where civilian leaders have vanished from the political map through assassinations, judicial executions, mysterious crashes and targeted killings.

In such a system, a jailed former prime minister held incommunicado does not spark disbelief, it revives a long and well-documented pattern.

A System Where Civilian Leaders Rarely Survive The State

In 1958, the country witnessed its first military coup when Governor-General Iskander Mirza imposed martial law and appointed General Ayub Khan as the chief martial law administrator. Within weeks, Ayub removed Mirza, exiled him, and installed himself as president. That moment established the template for how power would be transferred in the decades to come.

In 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power from Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He kept Bhutto under house arrest, imposed martial law, suspended the constitution and banned political parties. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf toppled Nawaz Sharif in another coup, took control of the state, and later elevated himself to president.

Each intervention signalled the same principle: elected leaders serve only until they trouble the establishment.

That power hierarchy has framed every major political death in Pakistan.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: The Coup, The Trial And The Hanging

The Bhutto–Zia era remains the most direct historical parallel to today’s anxiety. In July 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq ousted Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and placed him behind bars. What followed was a sequence Pakistanis now recognise: a jailed prime minister isolated from supporters, a contentious trial, relentless pressure on institutions, and a verdict widely seen as engineered.

Bhutto was convicted in a political murder case and hanged on April 4, 1979, inside Rawalpindi Jail. Decades later, Pakistan’s Supreme Court itself termed the proceedings “unfair". For many, it was a judicial assassination.

Benazir Bhutto: Assassinated In The Garrison City

In December 2007, two-time prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi after leaving an election rally. Shots were fired at her, and seconds later a suicide bomber detonated explosives, killing her and more than 20 others. Her death unfolded in the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment, the same city where her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been imprisoned and executed three decades earlier.

The attack did not come without warning. Just a few months earlier, in October 2007, Bhutto had survived one of the deadliest political attacks in Pakistan’s history when her Karachi homecoming convoy was targeted by a suicide bombing that killed around 139 people. That attempted assassination signalled the scale of threat she faced on her return to politics, yet she continued campaigning in an increasingly volatile environment.

A later United Nations investigation sharply criticised the Musharraf government for failing to provide adequate security and for obstructing the inquiry that followed. The crime scene was washed down within hours, destroying crucial forensic evidence. While various groups were blamed, no influential individual or institution has ever been held accountable.

Assassination Attempt On Imran Khan

Even Imran Khan has been on this list. In November 2022, during his long march in Wazirabad, he survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot in the leg. His immediate allegation that powerful state actors were involved became part of the larger narrative of political violence operating within Pakistan’s system.

A Political System Built On Coups, Not Continuity

The coups of 1958, 1977 and 1999 were not aberrations. They were turning points that entrenched the belief that political outcomes in Pakistan are shaped not by elections but by the military’s decisions.

This architecture still shapes the present. Imran Khan, like Bhutto before him, sits in Adiala Jail under a power structure dominated by the army chief. Asim Munir is widely described as the most powerful figure in the state. Under the newly passed 27th Constitutional Amendment, Munir now enjoys lifetime immunity and expanded constitutional authority.

A Country Where Political Deaths Are Not Extraordinary

Whether the current rumours about Imran Khan prove true or false is almost secondary. What matters is that they are plausible in a system where civilian leaders have been assassinated at rallies, hanged after disputed convictions, killed in custody, or removed through coups and judicial manoeuvring.

The real story is not the rumour itself , it is the history that makes such a rumour instantly believable.

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