Good column today by DawnNews show host Arifa Noor, who writes that voters — and not the establishment — are the ultimate deciders of a party's survival.

"The PML-N may have been a creation of the establishment but it became more than a sum of its parts. It transformed into a legitimate force in Punjab by capturing a vote in the province, which it still holds on to.

Noor explores the history of the establishment's meddling in politics — creating IJI to trump PPP in the 90s; supporting Q-league in 2002; breaking MQM in 2013; and battering PML-N today — but says the effectiveness of these campaigns lies in their ability to get mass support.

This paragraph on everyone's sudden interest in Karachi now that MQM is in tatters will make you chuckle:

"So Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has woken up to how poorly Karachi has been treated, while Imran Khan and Shahbaz Sharif have also shed some tears for the state the city is in... Mustafa Kamal (MQM 2.0) has also expressed his ambition to save the city from his parent party.

Bottom line: None of this ‘engineering’ would have succeeded without the will of the awaam.

Read the piece here.