Well, it's a complicated answer. On one hand, he doesn't speak Pashto as his mother tongue and on the other hand both his parents are of Pashtun extraction.
His paternal side is from the Niazi tribe in Mianwali. His clan, called the Shermankhel had settled in Mianwali in the 16th century. The Niazis in Mianwali mostly speak Seraiki as their mother language. There are still many Niazi Pashtuns in Afghanistan and they speak Pashto as their mother tongue.
Qila Niazi, a stronghold of Niazi Pashtuns in Afghanistan
His maternal side is from the Burki tribe. The Burkis were originally an Eastern Iranic people who spoke a language isolate called Ormuri. Bayazid Pir Roshan who invented the Pashtun script and had written the first book written in Pashto was from the Burki tribe himself. Imran's ancestors had settled in Jalandhar in Eastern Punjab from Afghanistan in the late 15th century and eventually adopted Punjabi and later Urdu. They migrated to Lahore after the Partition of India.
Peeli Kothi, the bungalow owned by Imran's maternal family in Jalandhar.
So, finally it boils down to self-identification. The descendants of Pashtun settlers in India have usually identified with being Pathan than any other local identity. Most of them however have not kept up with any Pashtun traditions. Many Pashtun nationalists would say that language and language alone should be the identity marker. That too isn't always universal. Linguistic shifts happen. People start speaking different languages than their ancestors did. Biggest examples would be the Christians of the Arab world and Non-Anglo European settlers in USA.
PML(N) had tried to identify itself as a Punjabi party in the 90s. Maryam Sharif was recently addressing rallies in Punjabi instead of Urdu. The Sharifs are of Kashmiri origin.
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