WITH this intense battle in Multan now over, the focus is to shift back to the main front, where Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is striving to stave off the long, persisting challenge to his rule.

The meandering course so far has had the challengers, both Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri, shift from dharna to jalsa and back to dharna, with the two leaders hopping from place to place to keep the momentum going. As sheer numbers go. the jalsa series is easier to sustain than the sit-in at the capital, which is now being used as a crucial thread that strings the public meetings together. The question is what next.

The government has so far managed to keep its chin high in its engagement with the protesters. Earlier, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not moved by the few hundred — or few thousand — people hitting the streets with calls for his resignation. Since then Mr Khan and Dr Qadri have spoken to a few very well-attended gatherings in Punjab and they are all set to carry their initiative forward deeper into the province, but this improvement on numbers does not impress the prime minister. Mr Nawaz Sharif now calls on his opponents to match the figure which he had secured in the 2013 election and there is not even a slight change in the argument of his colleagues and associates.

The situation is conducive for the PTI spread and signs are that PAT will also be able to display widespread support.

For some time during the dharna, it appeared as if all affairs of the government had been suspended and those in power were waiting for things to return to normal. Of late, there is an effort to just ignore the protest and take up official assignments as of routine. This seeks to recognise the protest as something permanent, which is a reputation that could really hurt Dr Qadri and Mr Khan, for permanence would signify lack of solution and stagnation.

The old theory which predicts eventual if delayed fizzling out of the protest is bandied about. Indeed, some of the lower-cadre PML-N politicians with a licence to be loose and adventurous in their summing up of the situation are so sure that they are heard daring the PTI and PAT to find a way to power.

The absence of the old interventionist solution is a problem that confronts the protesters of today. The search for old and new arbiters continues. Every now and then, there is a suggestion saying how it is the job of the ‘new judiciary’ to help find an answer to this most crucial question Pakistan is faced with. But soon enough the advice is trashed, because the country is said to have taken the vital turn and many of the informed minds involved in the debate consider judicial ‘mediation’ dangerous for both politics and the judiciary.

The people by the side of Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri may think otherwise. They are in need for an arbiter, a public arbiter beyond the ‘rumoured’ establishment that prefers to work in greater secrecy than before. At the same time, the protesters cannot help but find newer ways of nurturing their drive.

There is already a verdict which says that the PTI-PAT combine has served its purpose, that the Sharif government has been put in its place sufficiently in its relationship with the establishment. While this may be true and could be a source of confidence for the government in its fight against its challengers, there is no easy way out of it for the protesters. They must push forward and hope that the stream of masses that they have built up would find its own course towards resolution. This is uncharted territory for the country.

The protesters will have to continue, for no one knows how long. Whereas the government works to create the impression that it is not overtly bothered by the onslaught and that it is confident about its survival, the opposition show must continue. The opposition caravan must indicate movement and mobility.

In the old Pakistan, the protesting parties would often resort to small, local rallies to augment their national push. The PTI has organised dharnas in Karachi and Lahore to complement the sit-in in Islamabad; it will need to expand the protest to other towns in the country. The longer this goes on, the greater would be the need for it to have local faces taking it upon themselves to organise protest events in their areas.

The situation is conducive for the PTI spread and signs are that PAT will also be able to display widespread support. The dharnas will have to continue to bind the small pieces together but it is time for better organisation on the district level. The numbers have been demonstrated, the next task for the leadership is to put faces on these numbers to enable the local leadership all over.

The death of seven people in a stampede at the Multan meeting of the PTI highlighted the need for the party to better organise itself away from the more efficiently managed events in bigger cities. This organisation will take long and will inevitably involve dispute-resolution at local levels between groups and individuals. The in-party allegations that surfaced after the Multan jalsa are illustrative of the groupings that exist in all political parties.

The PTI might not want to deal with these details right at this moment and it might be keen to just keep these realities wrapped under its huge national banner for change. But as time passes, given the centralised scheme, Imran Khan will have to take time out of his public engagements to sit with the local-level PTI workers. That would be in the fitness of things given that it is he who has sent his opponents, prominent among them the Sharifs and Asif Ali Zardari, to re-establish contact with their own workers.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2014