Islamabad, Pakistan – Moments after Pakistan’s newly-elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif concluded his victory speech amid a ruckus in parliament, Omar Ayub Khan got up to address the house from the opposition benches.
Posters of Imran Khan, the chairman of Omar’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and a former Pakistani prime minister, were pasted on his desk and on those of his colleagues.
Wearing a red-and-green scarf, the colours of his PTI, 54-year-old Omar invoked a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is something rotten in the system of Pakistan today.”
According to Imran Khan, what is rotten is the role of Pakistan’s military establishment – which the former cricket captain-turned-politician accused of interfering in the country’s politics to remove him from power in 2022, a charge the army denies.
Omar, otherwise a keen adventure sports enthusiast with a passion for aviation and skydiving, has been far more circumspect, training his guns on the political parties that have combined to form the government: Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and other smaller parties.
“Their faces betray the fact they are unhappy. They know a theft took place,” he said in parliament, looking at the government benches. “They know the system cannot function like this. They have stolen our mandate.”
Yet the speech cemented his status as the parliamentary face of a party that appears to be relishing its stature as a force that has challenged the role of the military in Pakistan’s politics.
It is a legacy that Omar knows better than most.
It was his grandfather General Ayub Khan who delivered the first devastating blow to Pakistan’s fledgling democracy when he became its martial law administrator in 1958 and ruled the country for the next 11 years. Ayub’s tenure put in place a template that others would follow: Military rulers have directly governed Pakistan for more than 30 of its 77 years as an independent nation.
Now, Ayub’s grandson is pitching a new path for Pakistan, riding on the popularity of the PTI, which defied the odds in the February 8 elections to emerge as the party whose candidates won the most seats, despite not even being able to use their party symbol.
But the PTI was not Omar Ayub Khan’s first political calling. Or even his second.
Party-hopper to PTI loyalist
Until 2018, Omar Ayub Khan was known as a party-hopper in Pakistan. He contested the 2008, 2013 and 2018 elections representing three different parties, making him one of the most talked-about turncoats in the country.
That perception began to shift nearly two years ago when Imran Khan was voted out of power in parliament through a no-confidence motion, which the PTI accused the military of engineering.
To protest his removal and demand a snap election, Imran Khan, with tens of thousands of his supporters, planned a long march from Peshawar City to the capital Islamabad in May 2022, and gave the responsibility of organising the protest to Omar.
But the march was met with a brutal crackdown by the government. Omar was among those who were thrashed viciously.
“As I was trying to navigate past the obstacles to allow Khan’s container to pass through, police unleashed their fury on me, beating me non-stop with sticks,” Omar told Al Jazeera on Sunday as he sat for an interview in the living room of his residence in Islamabad’s leafy F-6 neighbourhood, hours after his speech in the parliament.
A red carpet covered the floor of the vast room, with mirrors lining the walls.
Omar cleared his throat – it was itchy, he said, and apologised – as he recalled the attack two years ago, which left him hospitalised for three days.
“I had vertigo, which I never got [previously] despite being an aviator. I had bruises all over my body. My ear drum almost ruptured. The doctors said if the beating on my back was merely inches above, I would have had irreversible spinal injury,” he said.
Meanwhile, images of his bruised body went viral – sealing his position as a prominent leader of the PTI.
For a man whose family has been a part of Pakistan’s elite since even before independence, it was a turning point.
His great-grandfather was a cavalry officer in the British army during the colonial rule over the subcontinent. Omar’s grandfather Ayub Khan ruled over Pakistan for more than a decade (1958-1969) with an iron hand, giving the country its second constitution in 1962, while also conducting elections in the same decade, which were rife with accusations of manipulation.
Omar’s father, Gohar Ayub, also briefly served in the military before joining politics and rising to be the speaker of the National Assembly as well as a foreign minister under three-time Prime Minister and PMLN supremo Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s.
Omar’s mother, Zeb Gohar Ayub, was the daughter of Habibullah Khattak, a top military general in the 1960s who was seen as one of the contenders to become the army chief. Similarly, his maternal uncle, Ali Kuli Khan, was also touted as a potential candidate for the army chief in the late 1990s.
Yet, when the security forces attacked Omar, none of that mattered.
Musharraf’s man
Omar was born on January 26, 1970, in Karachi, the country’s largest city – and its first capital before his grandfather moved it to Islamabad in the early 1960s – in the southern province of Sindh. His family, though, belongs to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s town of Haripur in the Hazara region, roughly 125km (77 miles) from the current capital.
He says his earliest memories are of numerous visits to Peshawar jail in the mid-1970s where his father, Gohar Ayub Khan, was imprisoned by then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Gohar fought the 1977 elections from jail and won, marking his entry into parliament. A little more than a decade later, he turned to Omar to help.
“I went to the United States in 1989 to study but the next year, my father asked me if I could take a semester off to help him run the election campaign,” Omar told Al Jazeera.
Omar watched his father become a key PMLN leader in the 1990s while he finished his master’s degree in business studies from George Washington University in the US.
Following a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999, which overthrew the then-Nawaz Sharif government, the PMLN found itself deserted by a large number of leaders, including Omar’s father Gohar, who joined the breakaway Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PMLQ) party.
After declaring himself the president in 2001, Musharraf conducted an election the following year, which Omar’s father was declared ineligible to contest.
So Omar contested on the PMLQ ticket and became a parliamentarian for the first time. His mother Zeb also became a member of a seat reserved for women for the same party.
He rose to become a parliamentary secretary and eventually, a cabinet minister between 2004 and 2007, under the premiership of Shaukat Aziz.
Defending his tenure under a military ruler’s government, Omar said those were the days of fast-paced economic and technological changes, which were important for the people.
“There was a boom in different sectors. TV channels emerged and telecoms came to Pakistan. It was a period of development and delivery, » …
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