PTI marchers leave Lakki Marwat for Islamabad as Naqvi says they will not enter

Supporters of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan left Lakki Marwat on Sunday and are walking and riding toward Islamabad. The BBC put the Sunday crowd at about 5,000, carrying the red and green flags of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. The column paused overnight and was expected to move again around midday on Monday. Interior minister Mohsin Naqvi said the government would not let it into the capital.

Lakki Marwat sits in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, about 275 kilometres from Islamabad. The province is run by Khan's party. Its chief minister, Sohail Afridi, is leading the march. He told the crowd on Sunday that by Thursday the movement should have reached a town about 80 kilometres west of the capital, and that by then every square in the country should be a centre of activity. He asked young people to come out for a leader who is in jail.

Why the talks failed, according to each side

The march is the sequel to a negotiation that collapsed. Naqvi, who sat for the government, said the break came because PTI refused to cooperate on a counter-terrorism policy for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province that borders Afghanistan and has taken the worst of the new militant attacks. The party disputes that account. PTI says the talks died because the government rejected a request for access to Khan, so that party leaders could consult him on national and political questions before signing anything.

Those two explanations are not small differences of wording. Naqvi's version makes the march a refusal to help the state fight militancy in the party's own province. PTI's version makes it a refusal to let a jailed leader speak to his own cabinet. Afridi governs that province. A chief minister leading a column on the capital is a different fact from a rally in a party stronghold. Naqvi's answer was blunt. "We will finish it once for all," he said, and added that the party could not be allowed to disrupt business in the capital at will.

The city is already blocked

Islamabad's administration has stacked shipping containers across key approach roads. That is the capital's ordinary answer to a PTI march, used in 2024 and after. Containers do not stop a crowd that is still 80 kilometres out on Thursday, which is Afridi's own timetable. They do fix the point at which a march becomes a confrontation: the ring road, the containers, and a decision about whether the police move first.

Earlier PTI marches on Islamabad have ended in deadly clashes and mass arrests. Khan has been in prison since 2023 on a stack of cases his party calls political. His wife, Bushra Bibi, was jailed with him last year. He is 73. Concern about his health has grown louder in recent months, and the party has used that concern as the public reason for the walk. The government has not, in Monday's statements, offered a medical briefing to answer it.

What Thursday would change

Afridi's Thursday marker is the number that matters. A column that is still in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Monday is a provincial demonstration. A column at a town 80 kilometres from Islamabad is a national one, inside the security perimeter the interior ministry has already said it will hold. Naqvi's "once and for all" is a threat aimed at that moment, not at Sunday's flags in Lakki Marwat.

The party has a second problem the march does not solve. Even if the containers are pulled back, Khan is in the custody of a court, not of the interior minister. A street that reaches D-Chowk can force a negotiation. It cannot, by itself, quash a conviction. PTI's demand for access, the point it says broke the talks, is the smaller and more immediate ask: let party leaders sit with him before the column arrives. Naqvi has tied any concession to cooperation on militancy in the province Afridi runs. Until one of those conditions moves, the march is a timetable, and the containers are the government's reply to it.