Najm us Saqib
Does anyone truly expect a miracle from PTI’s march to Islamabad tomorrow? Would the government release jailed PTI leaders and announce fresh elections simply because the opposition has parked itself behind shipping containers? Even PTI’s most optimistic supporters would not expect the government to fold.
So, what do they expect? That the government will concede demands like “restoration of an independent judiciary”, “media freedom”, or “Haqiqi Azadi”? Beyond signalling to the incarcerated Khan that his people were “trying”, nothing more can come of such a show of strength. Has anyone seen even a wrinkle on PM Shehbaz Sharif’s forehead? Meanwhile, the KPK Chief Minister struggles for his own position within the party amid confusion over rally dates, much like his predecessor endured the same charade.
As and when the march happens, the momentum will die down, as before. The protest will be choked, leaving PTI’s core demand, Khan’s release from Adiala Jail, unmet, yet again. Nothing will be new. And that is the point: nothing changes, because nothing was truly expected to. PTI has already agreed to negotiate and postpone the march if the dialogue yields a positive outcome, by which they mean permission to hold regular meetings with the incarcerated Khan. The government, meanwhile, sits comfortably under a secured umbrella, unmoved.
Pakistan’s political history has been written on the streets as much as in the corridors of power. From East Bengal’s language movement to the mass agitations that ended Ayub Khan’s and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s regimes, the street has remained central. Protesters surge, then recede; the power structure stays intact. But those were different days.
The four-year-old relationship between Khan’s PTI and the coalition governments led by PM Sharif has settled into a near-mechanical cycle: street mobilisation, state crackdown, brief and failed dialogue, return to agitation. Same script. Same film. Even the prints of the film were not considered worth changing. Meanwhile, the man on the street remains on edge, trying to wrestle with his daily wages, which were difficult to earn if the roads were blocked. This democracy doesn’t seem to be for the people.
Consider the record. Khan was removed in April 2022 through a no-confidence motion. Rejecting the new administration as “imported”, PTI launched public protests, including the May 2022 “Azadi March.” Divisions deepened after an assassination attempt on Khan in Wazirabad. In April 2023, Supreme Court-backed election talks collapsed. Khan’s May 9 arrest triggered violent protests targeting state and military symbols. The government launched a sweeping crackdown, arresting thousands, and PM Sharif shut down future dialogue, tweeting that “anarchists and arsonists who wear the garb of politicians… do not qualify for a dialogue.” The apex court offered no suo motu relief.
PM Sharif returned after the disputed February 2024 elections, and NA Speaker Ayaz Sadiq’s closed-door committee talks in late December 2024 stalled over judicial commissions and prisoner releases. The November 2024 fiasco at D-Chowk in Islamabad was perhaps the last serious effort by the then CM KPK and Bushra Bibi, as thousands of PTI supporters pushed past barricades into the capital’s high-security Red Zone. The heavens did not fall.
Yet outside the jail, PTI leadership continues to deliver speeches expressing eternal allegiance to Khan, but to what end? If they cannot secure the court’s orders to meet Khan on prescribed dates, what can a PTI supporter expect from them?
The ongoing political predicament raises a few pertinent questions. Why is the political process held back? The answer is not a lack of willingness to talk. It is that neither side can afford to talk on the other’s terms. PTI cannot abandon its demand for Khan’s freedom without losing its reason to exist, and the government cannot release a man it has convicted without appearing to surrender to the street. Khan’s release is a non-negotiable precondition for PTI, while the government insists he is a convicted prisoner whose cases must run their course; seventeen years of sentence, multiple convictions, and a party’s rejection of them as politically motivated change none of that. Is there a middle ground? Not while every dialogue collapses at the first agenda item.
The unspoken variable in every equation — the 2022 no-confidence vote, the May 9 crackdown, the 2024 election outcome — carries the same imprint. Until that reality is named and reckoned with, each side will keep negotiating around it rather than with it.
What have been the results of criticism by the EU, US and UK of the military courts’ convictions of civilians for the May 9 riots? Each side has its own story of legitimacy within this political loop, and neither has shown the appetite to break it, because doing so would require one side to act against its own short-term interests.
The disturbing questions continue. Will the next elections, whenever held, be free and fair? When will the nation have a genuinely independent Election Commission, and will there ever be an agreement on the credibility of election results? Wouldn’t future elections produce another disputed outcome and another cycle of agitation?
Pakistan’s politics stands at a dangerous impasse. Street pressure alone cannot force the power structure to yield, and dialogue windows open only to slam shut. Both sides claim to seek a solution, yet each sets conditions amounting to the other’s surrender.
When protest becomes routine, crackdown becomes the standard response, and dialogue becomes theatre, democracy is hollowed out one cycle at a time. Breaking that logic requires a third force, an outside guarantor, or an internal shift that neither side currently has the courage to start. Pakistan’s political future depends on whether such a shift comes before the next cycle begins. For a nation that has watched every script play out before, the only question left is whether it will recognise the ending in time to rewrite it.
The writer is a former Ambassador of Pakistan and author of eight books in three languages. He can be reached at [email protected]
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