By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf has publicly thrown its support behind Aleema Khan’s call for a fresh “long march,” the latest attempt by the jailed former prime minister’s family to force his release.
But according to party leaders, the endorsement comes wrapped in real anxiety — a fear that the demonstration could collapse into the kind of chaos that has haunted the party’s two most recent shows of street strength: the riots of May 9, 2023, and the bloody crackdown at Islamabad’s D Chowk in November 2024.
One senior opposition leader, however, said Aleema Khan’s own rhetoric has left the party rattled.
“There is no doubt that leaders, workers and people love and respect Imran’s family and will support her call for protest and march,” the leader said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But he went on to describe a pattern he sees as reckless — Aleema Khan, he said, has taken to criticising the party’s own lawmakers even as those same legislators do much of the quiet work of turning out demonstrators.
“Aleema has been trying to instigate people against MNAs and MPAs, ignoring the fact that a large number of workers go to Adiala jail thanks to persuasion by parliamentarians,” he said. “Duties are assigned to different wings of the party every week to ensure workers turn up at Adiala jail.” Even so, he acknowledged, the family’s pull is real: crowds keep showing up at the prison gates simply out of loyalty to Khan.
What worries him more is language he considers combustible. He pointed to statements in which Aleema Khan has told supporters the party will not retreat once it reaches its destination, and that any gunfire aimed at protesters “will not be tolerated” — phrasing he fears could tip a peaceful gathering into confrontation.
The stakes, he argued, are not abstract. Fourteen PTI workers were shot at D Chowk during the November 2024 protest, he said, and the party was never able to get so much as a First Information Report filed over the deaths. He noted that Aleema Khan visited the family of a supporter identified only as Satti, who was among those killed, but did not extend the same visit to the households of the other slain workers — an omission he raised without elaborating on its significance.
A pattern the party has seen before
A second leader, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said Aleema Khan is now urging supporters to converge on Adiala jail in large numbers — an idea the party has rejected before. He recalled that when Ali Amin Gandapur served as the province’s chief minister, similar calls were turned down out of concern they could be engineered as a “false-flag operation,” one that might ultimately be used to justify further action against Khan himself.
That leader also raised a question that has quietly nagged at PTI’s upper ranks: why does the party’s leadership keep looking to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, rather than Punjab, when it needs bodies in the street?
Part of the answer, he suggested, may come down to who is doing the asking. Gandapur’s successor as chief minister, Sohail Afridi, may struggle to summon the same numbers, the leader said, in part because Afridi is currently contending with a string of legal cases of his own.
Asked separately about Aleema Khan’s standing within the party, the same leader pointed to her reception on a recent visit to Chitral, in the country’s north, where he said she was greeted enthusiastically — evidence, in his view, that she has genuine popular support and does not need to lean on confrontational street politics to make her case.
It would not be the first time a member of Khan’s family has tried, and failed, to translate that kind of personal popularity into a mass mobilization. Bushra Bibi, Khan’s wife, made a similar attempt to draw supporters to D Chowk in the past; that effort did not produce the turnout organizers had hoped for.
The party’s public line
Publicly, PTI is not hedging. Sheikh Waqas Akram, the party’s information secretary, said the party is standing squarely behind Aleema Khan.
“Our only objective is to get Imran Khan released, and we will support anyone who works to that end,” Akram said. “We have been supporting Imran Khan’s sisters and sending workers to Adiala jail for over a year. The PTI and the chairman’s family are on one page.”
Akram also pushed back on a separate line of criticism that has followed the party in recent months — that its reliance on Khan’s relatives to lead protest efforts amounts to a turn toward dynastic politics. He rejected that characterization when asked about it directly.
The tension between that public solidarity and the private unease described by party insiders reflects a broader bind PTI has found itself in since Khan’s imprisonment. His family has increasingly stepped into a leadership vacuum at the center of the party’s protest movement, even as elected PTI officials — many of whom face legal jeopardy of their own for past demonstrations — are left to manage the logistics and absorb the risk of what comes next.
Khan, the party’s founder and former prime minister, has been held at Adiala jail in Rawalpindi since his August 2023 arrest, facing dozens of criminal cases that he and his party maintain are politically motivated. Whether Aleema Khan’s renewed call for a mass march produces the pressure the family is seeking, or the violence some in the party privately fear, may become clear only once demonstrators are already in the streets.
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