Imran Khan will face a major test with the rising Pashtun insurrection known as Pashtun Protection Movement (PTM), which has broken Pakistan’s heaviest taboo by several massive anti-army rallies across Pakistan since the beginning of the year.

Pakistan’s July 25 election resembled an episode of the theatre of cruelty.

There were accusations of vote-rigging and suicide bombings, which left at least 157 dead and over 200 wounded.

Internationally designated terror suspects allowed to contest the election, and the former prime minister was behind bars.

370,000 troops were deployed to the polling stations and the army officers had the power of magistrates. In the end, Imran Khan, the athlete playboy-turned political leader, became the winner.

The worst hit during the election were an estimated four million Ahmadis of Pakistan who were barred from voting. The Ahmadiyya are a minority religious community in Pakistan that revere Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of their sect, as a prophet, a claim that the dominant Muslim faiths and Pakistani law reject.

The irony is that the leaders of the Ahmadiyya community played a pivotal role in the creation of Pakistan itself in 1947. The world still remembers Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan—Pakistan’s first foreign minister and once the leader of all-India Muslim League who authored the resolution of the independent Muslim country in 1940 in Lahore.

The world also remembers Sir Mohammad Iqbal—the country’s national poet who, according to Tariq Ali converted to the Ahmadiyya sect. Abdus Salam, a Nobel laureate, also hailed from this community.

For Imran Khan, however, Pakistan turned out to be a promised land. The growing mistrust between the Pakistani army and the two dynasties, Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto, which alternatively ruled the country for decades left Pakistani generals with no choice but to cherry-pick Khan.

Watch Imran Khan’s complete speech in English

A Gallup poll gave Sharif’s party in May a 13-point lead over Imran Khan. Khan’s ascent to the upper-crust of Pakistani politics was much painless than his rise to the global fame as a cricket hero.

In the early 1990s, he was first discovered and groomed by General Hamid Gul, the ex-director of Pakistan’s feared military Intelligence, the ISI. Hamid Gul was also the chief incubator of the most lethal and ideologically driven religious extremists, including the Haqqani network.

Khan set up his Tahreek-e-Insaf, TIP, (Justice Party) in 1996 and used all his guile and fire-breathing rhetoric to cultivate himself as a fighter for the rights of the poor, an anti-corruption crusader, an anti-American, and a pious Muslim.

Earlier this year, Imran Khan’s ruling party in the Pashtun dominated Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province allocated US $3 million to the Haqqania madrassa, which is famous as the old “university of terror.”

Among the alumni of the madrassa are Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and an Al-Qaida leader, Asim Umar.

This generosity takes place at a time when Khan’s party closed 42 public schools for budget restriction in the tribal areas. The Janus-faced Khan is a Pashtun by birth, but in truth, he is a model Punjabicized (Punjab is the home of the majority of Pakistani generals) Pashtun.

The Pashtun Saplai (chappal) he is wearing is the only mark of his Pashtun bloodline. In his book, Pakistan: A Personal History, he is not ashamed of mocking his religiously minded fellow tribesmen, “For these resilient people, the existence of God and life after death were as obvious as the sun and the moon.”

In his victory speech, Khan pledged that he will build a new Pakistan, inspired by the kind of a state that Prophet Muhammad founded in Medina.

But the farrago of his styles makes this statement looks like a non sequitur joke. After less than ten months he divorced his ex-wife, Reham Khan just by sending her a text message when she refused to allow Khan’s pet dogs into their bedroom.

In her book released now on Amazon, she alleges that Khan was a sex maniac, cocaine user and always in a gay relationship with his senior party members.

One of the major tests Khan will be facing is the rising Pashtun insurrection known as Pashtun Protection Movement (PTM), which has broken Pakistan’s heaviest taboo by several massive anti-army rallies across Pakistan since the beginning of the year.

The PTM has two campaign slogans. One says, “this terrorism that you see, the uniform is behind it.” The other states that “Pashtuns of Up and Down (Afghanistan and Pakistan) are all Afghans.” Both seem to be too ominous to the ears of Pakistani generals.

The movement is openly pillorying the Pakistani army of extrajudicial killing, widespread disappearances of men and women, looting, and unlawfully incarceration of the Pashtun minority in Pakistan.

Manzoor Pashteen, the 24-year-old leader of the movement, recently said in an interview, “we don’t know much about Imran Khan, but we know one thing very clear and that is that we will never give up on our fight for the rights of the Pashtuns.”

The military so far has exercised utmost prudence in this matter, but surreptitiously, it is signaling a hardnosed approach to the demands of the Pashtuns who suspect Pakistani military of subverting their liberties.

The military, for example, has reorganized its “good Taliban” in the “security committee” in the tribal areas to eliminate members of the movement.

Fear of an entrenched pro-separatist sentiment among the ethnic Baluchs and Pashtuns has emboldened the country’s military to deploy an additional 60,000 troops to boost its patrols of Pakistan’s disputed border with Afghanistan known as the Durand Line.

The role of Imran Khan in dealing with the Pashtun uprising is yet to be seen.

Watch Imran Khan’s first speech to the nation [Urdu]

Ehsan Azari Stanizai, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Literary Theory at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Australia. Follow him on Twitter at @DStanza. Read other articles by Ehsan.