While i do agree with you that things are grim and are certainly not even close to a first world country but not that grim as you think, we have a lot of people living near or under poverty line for sure but boss ye karachi hai ... idhur koi bhooka nahin soota
The problem isnt so much whether Karachi is where it is or how overseas overzealous supporters want to imagine it or some revolution in Pakistan - but that from a pure who Pakistanis are all of these ideals fail because it is a case of Garbage in - Garbage out including IK and cultists of the movement will try to find every excuse to justify their existence while hiding their failures for a deeper diagnosis.
PTI failed not just because of establishment pressure, bad luck, or individual betrayal(
though all of those matter) but because it ran into a much deeper subcontinent reality that keeps repeating itself across Pakistan’s history. The region produces movements that can mobilize outrage very quickly, but it struggles to sustain disciplined, institutional change once immediate reward disappears and the real cost of restructuring power begins.
You can explain Pakistan itself this way.
`The country was created through a political movement that worked because it aligned at the right moment with elite Muslim interests and British exhaustion after World War 2, but once the state actually existed, the harder task was building a new civic and institutional order from scratch. That required delayed reward, long term discipline, and a real break from older feudal, patronage, and bureaucratic habits and that break never truly happened.
This is also why blaming only the military is too simple, even if
criticism of it is completely justified. Institutions recruit from society, and when the wider political and social pool is already shaped by patronage, nepotism, shortcuts, and transactional thinking, the institution itself reflects that garbage in and garbage out logic rather than escaping it.
You can see the same cycle in Pakistan’s political leaders. Asghar Khan had integrity and idealism, but he could not convert that into durable mass political movement in a culture that rewards patronage(aka TC) and maneuver(a.k.a chaploosi) more than principle. Bhutto and PPP did mobilize the masses and did change the language of politics, but the state they ran still reproduced coercion, elite manipulation, and top down control, so even their so called revolutionary phase became another version of the same system rather than a clean break from it.
PTI followed the exact same arc in a more modern form because connectivity increased.
But was not just blocked from the outside, it was exposed from the inside. It spoke the language of accountability, rupture, and anti status quo politics, but once in office it remained heavily personality driven, dependent on informal influence, and unable to build institutions that could stand apart from Imran Khan himself. That is why the establishment argument,
even when valid, is not enough.
If your entire project weakens the moment one man is removed, then you never built a system, you built a following or as it offends many here - a CULT. And when controversy around the leader’s wife, inner circle, and personalized choices starts to matter politically, that is not some side issue, it is proof that the movement had already fallen back into the same non institutional habits it claimed it would defeat.
That is why PTI failed in the deeper sense. It was not only defeated from outside but was also limited from within by the same civilizational and political habits it claimed it would overcome. In Pakistan, every major movement eventually collides with a system that pushes back, waits out the emotional wave, and then absorbs the challenger into an updated version of the same old order.
Take India. Even with stronger institutions, electoral continuity, and real state capacity, the deeper subcontinent pattern still shows up there as well. Modi and the BJP present themselves as a force of civilizational renewal in Hindutva and national transformation, but a lot of that energy still gets translated into centralization, symbolic politics, electoral consolidation, and absorption into the existing logic of power rather than a total break from it. That is the broader regional pattern: movements rise in the language of change, but the system is usually flexible enough to absorb them and turn them into another layer of itself.
The contrast with other regions is that in places like parts of Europe, Japan, or China, major upheaval more often left behind stronger institutions, deeper administrative change, and a clearer culture of long term structural follow through rather than just a new faction inheriting the same underlying social order.
So the real PTI discussion is not whether Imran Khan was better than the others in rhetoric or intent. The real question is whether PTI ever had the discipline, institutional imagination, and social base to break a pattern that has shaped the subcontinent for centuries and the answer is probably NO.
It became the latest movement to
expose the system, but not the first one capable of
replacing it.