The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf first said it would march on Islamabad on September 27. A day or two before, it moved the date to October 4. On October 4 the march did begin, at Gandi Chowk in Lakki Marwat, and the party itself described it as starting “in instalments”.
Since then the convoy has been travelling through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the one province PTI governs. It reached Karak, then Kohat. On Tuesday the route changed. Chief Minister Sohail Afridi turned the convoy towards Khyber district instead of Peshawar, and said the next phase would be announced from there. He has told his workers that the real contest, a “T20 match” in his words, begins on October 8. Until the convoy crosses the Indus into Punjab, this is a tour of friendly territory.
The government is taking no chances. Dawn has reported that the Islamabad administration arranged 1,550 shipping containers, at a rent of about Rs46.5 million a day, and that the bill for security could pass Rs1 billion because the march was put off. Party leaders were picked up in Punjab and Islamabad a week before the first date. Punjab barred the use of state resources for the march. On Tuesday the province imposed Section 144 for ten days.
The interior minister has sat with the governor of KP to discuss governor’s rule or an emergency. The governor has said openly that he doubts the party has the strength to take its march beyond Attock. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has offered fresh talks, but only if the march is called off first.
So a billion rupees may be spent to stop a march that has not yet left home. That tells us something about the government’s nerves. It tells us more about the party.
The most popular party, and still no resistance
PTI is, in my view, the most popular party in the country. Yet in three years it has not been able to resist the establishment in any way that counted. The march led by Ali Amin Gandapur in November 2024 reached Islamabad and was broken up in a night. Nothing about this is new. No political party in Pakistan has ever managed it.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a big leader and a loved one. He gave the country its nuclear programme and its 1973 Constitution, and he brought the heads of the Muslim world to Lahore. When General Zia removed him, Bhutto warned that if anything happened to him the Himalayas would weep. He was hanged in 1979. The Himalayas did not weep, and his party could not raise a mass movement to save him. Several of its senior men made their peace with the general.
Nawaz Sharif had a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly when General Musharraf removed him in 1999. Lahore, his own city, stayed quiet. He left jail the following year through a deal arranged with help from abroad, and the price was ten years out of politics.
There was a time when little moved in Karachi without Altaf Hussain’s permission. When the state finally moved against his party, the city did not rise for him.
Benazir Bhutto wrote, before her death, that General Musharraf should be held responsible if she was killed. She was assassinated in December 2007. Sindh burned for a few days. Then Asif Ali Zardari said “Pakistan Khappay”, and things went back to what they had been.
Why does this keep happening?
We inherited a garrison, not a movement
People and nations act out of their history. In the subcontinent, the serious resistance to the British came from Bengal, from Mysore, from Delhi and from Awadh. Siraj-ud-Daulah fought at Plassey. Tipu Sultan died with a sword in his hand. In 1857 General Bakht Khan held Delhi, and Hazrat Mahal and the Rani of Jhansi fought on. Siraj was betrayed by Mir Jafar and Tipu by Mir Sadiq, and Iqbal cursed both names in a couplet every schoolchild once knew.
The lands that make up Pakistan today had a different experience. Punjab and the Frontier became the recruiting ground of the British Indian Army. In 1857 it was soldiers raised here who helped the British retake Delhi. Punjab’s politics were dominated until 1946 by the Unionist Party, which worked comfortably with the Raj.
There were brave exceptions, and they deserve their names such as Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal, Bhagat Singh, the Hurs of Sindh, the Khudai Khidmatgars of the Frontier. But they were exceptions. The state that was born in 1947 inherited the barracks, the cantonments and the habits of the garrison. It did not inherit the rebellion.
Bengal kept its habit too. The Bengalis of East Pakistan resisted this same establishment, and we know how that ended. In 2024 a student uprising in Bangladesh drove Sheikh Hasina out of the country after fifteen years in power. History does not disappear. It is passed down.
Parties built around one man
History can be changed by leadership. Whatever one thinks of what they built, Lenin, Mao and Khomeini each took an old, settled society and turned it upside down. Pakistan, after the Quaid-i-Azam and Liaquat Ali Khan, has had no leader who built something bigger than himself.
Bhutto was a well-read man, but he never let democracy into the People’s Party. A party that chose its own leaders might have fought for him. The Pakistan Muslim League-N is run as a family concern. The MQM circled around Altaf Hussain, and when he was gone it shrank.
PTI has been a one-man show from its first day. PTI means Imran Khan. Look at what the party is asking for this month that he be moved from jail to a hospital, that its leaders be allowed to meet him, that he be released. The talks with the government broke down, among other things, over a jail meeting. The party says the other sticking point was the Centre’s insistence on military operations in KP. A movement whose every demand is about one prisoner can be managed by whoever holds the key to his cell.
It is worth remembering the one time the street did win. The lawyers’ movement of 2007 to 2009 restored a chief justice against the wishes of a general and then of an elected president. It had no single owner. It rested on bar associations in every district, with elected office-holders who could be replaced. That is what organisation looks like, and it is exactly what our parties lack.
What the coming days will show
Within days we will know whether this march is a real attempt to reach Islamabad or one more date on a calendar. The signs are mixed. The opposition leader in the Senate has already said the marchers are coming empty-handed and will stop peacefully wherever they are blocked. I would not be surprised either way.
But the outcome will not change the larger point. The establishment has not survived every challenge because it is so strong. It has survived because the parties facing it are so weak inside, that have no elected office-bearers, no local structure, no second tier that can carry on when the leader is locked up.
A party that wants to resist has to become a party first. Until one does, the containers will keep winning, and we will keep paying the rent on them.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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