KARACHI: It was 2007 when Karachi walls and installations were splattered with spiteful anti-Imran Khan slogans. While the move was politically motivated and went mostly unnoticed by Karachiites, the party had no means of countering it on the streets and roads of the city.

By the end of 2014, Khan’s party has become one of those political forces that can — in typically Karachi’s context — paralyse city life. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf is now almost as popular on the streets of Karachi as it is in the drawing rooms of the city’s chattering classes.

Despite the fact that the PTI enjoys considerable support of the youth, the question that vexes the minds of party leaders and surprises political analysts is that all this youthful activism and popularity does not mean increasing organisational development and training of cadres.

For Ali Zaidi, the newly elected president of the Karachi PTI, 2014 was a ‘wonderful year’ for the party. His assessment is almost spot on. That is to say, PTI popularity has been steadily rising in the urban centres of the city. But what about the low-income neighbourhoods? “That’s the task I have been elected for,” says Mr Zaidi, just a day after his election as the party’s Karachi president. “We have a plan and a team to execute it. What we need to do is give our 100 per cent and then it’s up to Karachiites if they go for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the Pakistan Peoples Party or the Jamaat-i-Islami or our party. We are much more organised than we were in the past and much more hopeful about the future.”

It was December 2011 when the PTI, riding a wave of new-found popularity in the country, staged its first massive rally in the stronghold of the MQM near the Mazar-i-Quaid. And within one and a half years the party has emerged as the second largest political force of the city to get the highest number of votes after the MQM, though it could win only one National Assembly and two Sindh Assembly seats in May 2013.

In 2014 the party staged two successful political shows in Karachi — a rally at the Quaid’s mausoleum and sit-ins on main roads and at key traffic intersections in line with its nationwide ‘plan-C’ protest campaign to demand a probe into alleged election rigging that paralysed life in the city.

Senior analysts and political pundits acknowledge PTI’s popularity but don’t see it achieving anything in terms of organisation. With this trend, the PTI has to go a long way before getting itself recognised as a genuine street power of Karachi.

“No doubt about it,” says novelist and political analyst Mohammed Hanif when asked for comment on burgeoning PTI popularity in Karachi. But he has other arguments to share that could be food for thought mainly for PTI leaders.

“But if you go to the streets of Karachi or in any neighbourhood where a majority of Karachiites live, they know that the other party [MQM] could be accessed in case of any problem or grievance. They have a much developed organisational structure which the PTI has not been able to compete with despite its growing popularity.”

But he says he believes that the party which has grown to the existing level of popularity in the past few years would hopefully be able to address these issues as well. At the same time, he says, that particular flaw may not affect the results of the general election’s considering the elections dynamics of Karachi.

But in 2014 what surprises many is a sudden change in the relations between the PTI and the MQM — the blue-eyed party of the General Musharraf regime that stopped the PTI’s founding chief Imran Khan from even entering Sindh in 2007 during the movement for the restoration of the pre-PCO judiciary.

Those were the days when uncharitable remarks and allegations formed the major content of primetime television shows for some time. Many had yet to erase those memories, though leaders from both sides had almost been silent over the bitter past, when Imran Khan in May 2013 accused MQM chief Altaf Hussain of having a hand in the killing of PTI senior leader Zohra Shahid a day before repolling on NA-250 from where it later emerged victorious.

“I don’t think those days would return,” says Mr Hanif. “You have seen in recent days that the PTI has been able to do all its political activities in Karachi which suggests that both sides have realised the situation. There would be a kind of war of words or debate between the parties but nothing more than that would happen, I think, as both have learnt to go along with their political share.”

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2014