Imran Khan, The Captain Of Pakistan?

Rawalpindi is seen to patronise him. And it’s a conducive pitch electorally—even if Nawaz Sharif, playing the victim card, poses a threat from prison. But the pennants of Imran Khan’s PTI fly the highest. Can he lay a new path for Pakistan’s fractured polity?

- Arifa Noor in Islamabad

Imran Khan looks a bit like he used to at the top of his run-up, keen as a rapier and bustling with intent. He’s a man on a mission, addressing public meetings twice a day across electoral battlegrounds. Still extremely charismatic at 65, he’s the only real crowd-puller whose presence can make a difference to a candidate running under the banner of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). Pakistan, like India, labours under the slippery first-past-the-post system—a few floating votes can settle a game. And if anyone can swing the ball in dead air, it’s the Pathan.

The schedule must be gruelling even for a physically fit Imran, but it doesn’t show. The excitement of what comes next must be driving him. Pakistan is staring at an electoral landscape shorn of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the duo that dominated politics in the post-Zia era. That’s a huge, roiling vacuum. What that means is, perhaps for the first time since 1996, when Imran founded his party, there is unparalleled confidence about the PTI’s chances in an election.

The party may have launched its manifesto after the other two main parties—the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)—but Imran has been spelling out his agenda for months now. At a big rally in Lahore back in April, he gave his 11-point agenda for governance. A month later, he unveiled his 100-day action plan.

THE PTI’s senior leadership is confident enough to assert that it will lead the lower house of parliament and it’s unfazed by the allegation levelled by all other parties that it is the ‘ladla’ (favourite son) of the powers that be. While the PPP and the PML(N) struggle with corruption cases and arrests (as well as security concerns for the latter), the PTI is seen to be racing ahead without any such impediments.