The doctor who built PTI's digital machine

From Andaroon Lahore to the lawyers’ movement

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a guest he had been trying to pin down for some time — Dr. Arslan Khalid, former focal person on digital media to Prime Minister Imran Khan and briefly Punjab’s IT Minister. The difficulty in scheduling, Muzamil notes, was partly a reflection of the turbulent political moment Pakistan was living through.

Arslan’s origin story is grounded and specific. He grew up in Mazang, a neighbourhood inside the old city of Lahore, where his father was a senior official at WAPDA. His schooling ran through Crescent Model Higher School and then Government College University before he entered King Edward Medical University — a choice shaped almost entirely by family culture. “Apart from me, everybody — practicing doctors, professors — the whole family is from the medical profession,” he explains. Medicine was the default, not a calling.

The pivot toward politics came not from ambition but from proximity. In 2007, during his final year at King Edward, his gynaecology professor Dr. Yasmeen Rashid was deeply involved in the lawyers’ movement. Every Thursday there was a rally on Mall Road — which runs directly past King Edward — and students would walk over. “That’s where it started,” Arslan says. The lawyers’ movement gave him his first taste of organised civic action.

Young Doctors Association and the six-thousand-rupee salary

After graduation came the house job, and with it a radicalising encounter with the state of Pakistan’s public health system. A house officer’s salary at the time was six thousand rupees a month — and sixty percent of house officers received nothing at all, working without pay. “The system had no sensitisation to the problem,” Arslan recalls. Young doctors were treated as a transient inconvenience: some would leave for abroad, those who stayed would eventually become consultants and make money, so nothing needed to change.

The Young Doctors Association emerged from that frustration. Arslan joined, and it was through that space — where professional grievance met political consciousness — that he encountered PTI. Imran Khan was visiting universities in 2008 and 2009, delivering lectures, and the message resonated. “He was coming to universities, giving lectures, and a very clear message was resonating with us at the time.” Arslan joined PTI and became part of the Insaf Student Federation, eventually taking on the role of ISF marketing head for Punjab.

The Obama campaign and the switch to social media

The move from street politics to digital was partly practical — a medical career with hospital duties made constant physical mobilisation impossible — and partly visionary. PTI had noticed the 2007–2008 Obama campaign, which ran almost entirely on social media. “The majority had followed that campaign. It was clear from that moment that this is the future.”

Arslan’s own recruitment into PTI’s digital operation is a telling detail. He was writing blogs under a pseudonym on a popular website when a PTI member in Lahore found him, messaged him, and asked him to join. “This is how it started,” he says. The early social media team was built by headhunting — finding people who were already producing content and pulling them in.

By 2013 he had responsibility for Lahore’s social media. By 2016 or 2017 he was operation lead for all of Pakistan. By 2018 he was PTI’s social media secretary, overseeing the entire national operation before handing it over when his role changed with the government’s formation.

One structural detail stands out: PTI imposed a two-year tenure limit on social media roles. No one could stay beyond two years. “You constantly have a pipeline developing. It’s not possible for a fifty-year-old youth president type to just sit there.” The discipline was deliberate.

The Minar-e-Pakistan moment and the middle class

Muzamil asks about the October 2011 Minar-e-Pakistan jalsa — the rally widely credited with transforming PTI from a niche movement into a mass political force. Arslan was there personally, and his explanation is structural rather than mystical.

“The appeal that existed in 2011 is still there, because the factors surrounding us are still the same.” The two-party system had been captured by two dynasties. A third party’s emergence was not an accident — it was the inevitable response to that capture. What changed at Minar-e-Pakistan was who showed up: “It was majorly families that were coming. People who had never come before.” The middle class, which had historically stayed away from politics, began to arrive.

“When your strongest class is alienated from politics and begins to demand a stake, that is the biggest problem for the status quo.” The mobile phone did the rest. Imran Khan’s message — against corruption, against political dynasties — had been the same since 1996. What changed was that every person now had a phone and could access it directly.

Zero infrastructure: building the government’s digital presence from scratch

When PTI formed the government in 2018, Arslan’s role shifted from party to state. What he found was startling. “When we came into government, there was zero digital infrastructure. Zero. The Prime Minister’s Office had no social media account. The President’s Office had no account.” This was 2018.

The first year was spent building a structure: mapping all of Pakistan’s missions abroad, creating a digital media wing, connecting it to ministries and departments, and establishing what a centralised government digital operation should look like. He describes the ambition clearly — a Pakistani mission in the United States should have an audience based in the United States, not in Lahore. Its content should be relevant to that country. “Your overseas Pakistanis are a huge strength. Your diaspora is sitting there. Have you ever engaged them for this work?”

The deeper frustration was institutional memory — or its absence. “You build a system, you make it flourish, there is a thought process behind it. Then the government changes and there is no institutional memory. The good work just disappears.” The digital assets, the mission accounts, the strategic framework — all of it was left to atrophy.

The PM Citizen Portal and the man at the top

Muzamil raises the Prime Minister’s Citizen Portal — one of the more visible digital governance initiatives of the PTI government — and asks whether it is still functioning. Arslan’s answer is careful. The system exists. The question is whether it has the same backing.

“The portal worked because the Prime Minister was accessible. There was a report. Compliance increased because of that backing.” The deputy secretary who ran it, Adil Safi, was in the office by nine in the morning and stayed until nine-thirty at night — for the same salary as everyone else. “It’s about passion, about responsibility.” The system was built. Whether the next administration chose to use it was a different matter.

The broader point Arslan makes about digitising government is uncomfortable: the resistance is not primarily technical. “If you digitise, a lot of things get caught — from financial irregularities to daily attendance. The transparency that comes with digitisation is a subject nobody wants to touch.” The cabinet going paperless was a first step. Everything else stalled.

The cost of doing politics and the leadership void

Later in the discussion, Muzamil pushes on youth participation in politics — how new faces are identified, how they are vetted, and what the road map looks like for someone with no political dynasty behind them.

Arslan’s answer is honest about the structural problem. “The cost of doing politics in Pakistan is very high — and I am not talking about money. I am talking about mental stress, victimisation, toxicity, polarisation.” Talented people come, stay six or eight months, find it exhausting, and leave. “You feel like, where have I ended up? And you go.” The result is that there is no queue of applicants.

He is equally direct about the parliament’s demographic crisis. Pakistan’s average age is 24. Its parliament’s average age is around 55 to 60. “That means the shelf life of the current leadership is ten to fifteen years. Once that shelf life is over, you are going to get into a void — a huge void where mature, developed leaders simply do not exist.” The student union ban of the 1980s is part of the explanation: that was the pipeline that produced young leaders, and it was closed.

His proposed solution is a hybrid: use digital tools to build internal party democracy — an app-based voting system at the UC level that surfaces community leaders organically — while maintaining the face-to-face contact that Pakistani politics still requires. “Digital has been used to push party messaging outward. It has not been used to build structures within the party.” He sees the PTI app, Raabta, as a platform that could do this if properly developed and centralised under a single IT board rather than fragmented across competing initiatives.

Political dynasties and the inevitable

By the end of the conversation, Arslan makes his most sweeping claim — and he makes it without hedging. “Write this down from me: political dynasties in Pakistan will end. It is not possible that you keep asking people to accept your children. In the age of information, in a knowledge economy, you can block it today, you will have to open it in six months, in two months. The world is going to move on.”

He draws on examples from Turkey, Indonesia, India, and the Western world to argue that the current system is simply not sustainable. The middle class understands the economy now. “Talk to a redi wala, a tanga wala, a corporate employee, a CEO — the understanding of politics, of economics, is there. How long can you run a system against that awareness?”

On Imran Khan specifically, Arslan is clear about what success would actually mean. “Imran Khan’s success will not be another term. His success will be building a system in which the next generation of youth gets equal opportunity, where the system protects them regardless of which side of the power equation they are on.” The twenty-two years it took Khan to break through — as Pakistan’s best cricket captain, a philanthropist, an international celebrity — is evidence that no one without that specific combination of assets could have done it. The task now is to make the next breakthrough cost less.

Muzamil closes by asking whether Arslan sees hope. The analytical answer is yes — every system he has studied eventually evolves. The emotional answer is harder. “My wife used to drive to get groceries. She doesn’t go anymore. The fear factor is phenomenal.” The diaspora is drifting. Professionals are saving rather than investing. “But where there is this level of awareness, you cannot hold back improvement for very long. The youth just needs to focus — and understand that results in politics do not come in six months. But when they come, they come well.”

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