mran Khan was ousted from power in an unprecedented no-confidence motion brought by the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) with support from disgruntled Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) lawmakers and coalition allies. In the end, the PTI parliamentarians did not have to vote against the prime minister. However, ahead of the formal vote, many of them had openly expressed their grievances against the party chairman and his policies.

Earlier, the PTI leadership had turned a deaf ear to all rebellious talk in the party. Some of the ‘defectors’ blamed it on the ‘dictatorial’ attitude of their leaders. Others said they were fed up with poor governance, the economic mess, the unprecedented price-hike or the ‘sham’ accountability.

Having lost the power, an irate Imran Khan and his loyal supporters have chosen to take to the streets. Staging jalsa after jalsa, Imran Khan has mastered the skill of pulling huge crowds. He has shown muscle in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore. Will this show of power translate into polling of enough votes? Will the people buy his narrative of ‘foreign conspiracy’? Will his poor performance be forgotten? Are people still willing to buy his pitch of a Naya Pakistan?

One of the challenges the PTI is going to face is to muster enough grassroots support ahead of the next elections to win without the electables and a nod from the powers-that-be. Dozens of electables from his party have abandoned him during the last leg of his tenure. The biggest challenge Imran Khan faces is to keep the party intact without the support of Jehangir Khan Tareen and Aleem Khan groups.

The PTI government was marred by incompetence, mismanagement, indecisiveness, bad governance and a failure to bring about the much-trumpeted reforms in police, education, health and judiciary. It has very little in terms of performance to sell. This is apparently the reason why party bigwigs have decided instead to sell the ‘foreign hand’ story. Imran Khan has said that this time he will not award tickets to the so-called electables. His preference, he says, will be the PTI old guard and those had remained loyal to the party. He has also vowed to re-organise the party with the support of the youth. In the past, however, he has shown a weakness for the lure of big shows and not much patience with the grind of constituency politics.

While Khan is doing what he is best at, the opposition parties are doing constituency politics. Some of them have already welcomed the stray electables in their folds. There is a marked difference between organising huge gatherings in large cities and establishing a direct contact with the voters in their constituencies. The opposition, especially the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), is focusing on that.

Most of the PTI leaders today are entirely dependent on Khan’s charisma to win their seats. They can take heart from the fact that most of the support for Khan is intact. However, huge public gatherings in the past did not result in winning a majority of seats in the Punjab. The establishment then had to step in to help Khan form the government in the Centre.

After the 2018 elections, the PML-N had a single-point agenda: wait Imran Khan out. They would talk about a bubble burst. They said they could just sit there and watch the popularity of PTI decline by the day until it drowned in a sea of bad governance and extremely poor handling of national and international affairs. The PTI government failed miserably to fulfill its lofty promises. “We never wanted to give Imran Khan a chance to blame us. By appointing Usman Buzdar as chief minister of the biggest province of the country, Imran Khan actually helped us. We never needed to challenge him on the streets,” a senior PML-N leader had said just before the no-confidence move steered by the Pakistan Peoples Party supremo Asif Ali Zardari. “We want him (Imran Khan) to complete his tenure. That is what the party leadership in London also desires,” the PML-N leader had said then.

The surprise of the no-confidence motion has disturbed the PML-N plan. The government is not in full control of things in Islamabad and in the Punjab, Hamza Shahbaz has struggled even with his oath-taking ceremony. There is an apprehension in the PML-N that Imran Khan and the PTI might benefit from the situation.

The PTI does not stand a chance to win a considerable number of seats in the Punjab after over three years of misgovernance by Imran Khan’s “Wasim Akram Plus” – Usman Buzdar. The one year the PML-N government is likely to get to settle the economic mess will determine whether it can stay as strong as it has been in the recent past, winning most by-elections in the province. Losing seats in the central Punjab to the PTI due to the incumbency factor is the big worry for the PML-N.

The PTI faces a daunting challenge of gaining more space in the Punjab. Its strategy of relying on big rallies is unlikely to get it there. In 2013, the party had won only one National Assembly seat from Lahore. In 2018, it won three following a ferocious campaign against the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and his family. Posing a credible challenge to its arch rival – the PML-N – in its stronghold in the coming elections will be a big test for the PTI.

The writer is a senior broadcast journalist, and has worked with several news channels in Pakistan