<\/p>\n
Dubai, Aug. 26 (TNS): Reham Khan, the 45-year-old British-Pakistani author, journalist and former wife of Pakistan\u2019s new Prime Minister Imran Khan, flatly denies any correlation between the timing of her forthcoming memoir\u2019s release and her ex-husband\u2019s accession to high office, UAE based media group \u2018The National\u2019 reported here on Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor years, I kept hearing rumours every few months about how I was writing an expos\u00e9,\u201d Reham Khan, who was born in Libya to Pakistani parents, says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rumours started even before we\u00a0got divorced \u2013 just four or five days after we decided to end our marriage. The divorce deed hadn\u2019t\u00a0been delivered to me when they started.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had tabloids offering me \u00adridiculous sums of money to talk about Imran and his lifestyle. I think his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf [PTI], was nervous about what book I might write, so PTI workers started maligning my name every chance they got.<\/p>\n
“Every time the PTI attacked Nawaz Sharif [former Pakistani prime minister and founder of Pakistan Muslim League], they claimed I was writing a slanderous book to undercut Imran. In some ways, it was the PTI\u2019s obsession with this book that made me do it. I may have written it at some point, I\u2019m a journalist, after all, but PTI made me focus on doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan worked as a broadcast journalist in the UK for nearly a decade before moving to Pakistan in 2013 to work on TV news there. Her book,\u00a0scheduled for release on Friday, has benefited from the ex-cricketer\u2019s election win, even though she says that he and his party are \u201cworse than naked dictatorship\u201d.<\/p>\n
Khan says that it was the possibility of death that became the defining factor that lead to her writing the book. \u201cAs Imran became more deeply entrenched in PTI, the frequency and severity of the threats intensified. I was a single mother of three. And the threats came in a way that couldn\u2019t be proved in a court of law \u2013 in the form of brotherly advice about how dangerous it would be to write a book that exposed Imran\u2019s duplicity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen that happens to you for years, at some point you realise that there will be no one left to tell your story if you die,\u201d shesays. \u201cThe PTI thought that it would scare me into silence, but it chose the wrong woman to mess with. Instead of instilling fear in me, the threats made me realise that I needed to tell my story before they killed me. When someone doesn\u2019t want a story to come out, it lights a fire in me to tell it with even more ferocity.\u201d And so started the four-month long process of sifting through entries in old journals, penning\u00a0new notes, and putting her short-lived marriage \u2013 Reham and Imran were married for nine months in 2015 \u2013 in the context of Pakistan\u2019s political landscape and Imran\u2019s growing clout within it.<\/p>\n
Khan started writing her book in September last year, and by December her first draft was ready. Despite global interest and coverage, she has struggled to publish it. Her current publishers, Harper Collins, have excluded Pakistan as a distribution territory for the book, which meant Khan has privately sold an unedited, uncensored version there. \u201cWith the help of a few friends and family, I printed some copies and we\u2019re practically just distributing them in Pakistan \u2013 just so that people can know what the truth is,\u201d the author says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dubai, Aug. 26 (TNS): Reham Khan, the 45-year-old British-Pakistani author, journalist and former wife of Pakistan\u2019s new Prime Minister Imran Khan, flatly denies any correlation between the timing of her forthcoming memoir\u2019s release and her ex-husband\u2019s accession to high office, UAE based media group \u2018The National\u2019 reported here on Sunday. \u201cFor years, I kept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76371,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76369\/revisions\/76371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/76370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}