A political party can survive a bad election cycle. What it cannot survive is the painful discovery that its own people are no longer sure where to stand. PTI’s Muzaffarabad rally was meant to answer one question: could the party still travel beyond Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and summon a crowd on command? The answer came in rows of red chairs.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi wielded the theatre of relevance–complete with banners, media crews, security, and speeches calling for a resurgence of street movements–yet the ground reality stood in stark contrast.
That matters because PTI once made crowd politics its proof of life. In 2011, Imran Khan drew more than 100,000 people in Karachi, a rally that announced him as a national force outside Punjab. The same year, Lahore gave PTI its Minar-e-Pakistan moment. In light of that history, Muzaffarabad transcended mere scheduling missteps, representing a significant contraction of public confidence, unfolding right before everyone’s eyes.
The Adiala story makes the optics worse. That not a single PTI leader turned up at Adiala Jail on Thursday to meet Imran Khan, and it was the second such no-show, speaks volumes about the glaring disconnect.
CM Afridi says Khan has assigned him the task of preparing the street movement. Fine. However, movements are not announced by video messages. They are built through district offices, union councils, legal committees, women’s networks, student wings, and workers who believe someone will stand with them after the cameras leave. PTI’s current politics often sounds like a call to sacrifice from people who themselves appear unsure about the plan.
Pakistan does need political voices. It needs parties that organise, legislate, negotiate and accept accountability; not parties trapped in pigeonhole agendas at the expense of the public good. Yes, PTI has a constitutional right to campaign and protest, but it also has a political duty to stop mistaking sympathy for structure.
There is also a question of timing. Islamabad is navigating a fragile diplomatic moment, trying to sustain a ceasefire framework that it helped broker at the last minute and holding external partners to their word. That requires coherence at home. At the end of the day, Muzaffarabad settled a question PTI did not intend to ask. The party may still command a stage. It can no longer assume it commands the street. *