He was sentenced to one year in prison, but remains a prominent figure in the opposition.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been incarcerated for a year now, but sometimes it’s hard to notice.

Khan remains a powerful force in Pakistan’s opposition politics, his name still appears in newspapers and courtrooms, and his supporters on social media continue to be relentless.

His absence from public view has left the few people who are allowed to meet the former cricketer on a regular basis – his lawyers and family – to act as his conveyors of his message to the outside world, eager to get across that he did not give in despite spending 365 days in prison.

“He still has that swagger,” said Imran Khan’s sister, Aleema Khanum. “He doesn’t need anything, he doesn’t want anything, he just has a cause.”

Visitors said Mr. Khan spends his days riding his stationary bike, reading and contemplating. He also spends an hour a day walking in the courtyard. There are sometimes disagreements between his family about how quickly they can provide him with new books.

“He said, ‘I’m not going to waste a single minute of my time in prison, this is an opportunity to increase my knowledge’,” Khanum told the BBC.

But the reality is that Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, remain locked up in prison with no sign of being released anytime soon.

According to some, this is not surprising.

“There was no expectation that Khan would do anything to make it easier for him to get out of prison,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.

And Pakistan’s powerful shadow government, the military, “will not back down when it decides it wants to put a politician behind bars,” Kugelman said, “especially in the case of Khan.”

Indeed, the military has been key to many of Khan’s life’s ups and downs over the past decade, and many analysts say his rise to power was due in part to his early close ties with the military.

But by May 9 last year, that all fell apart. After being ousted from power in a 2022 no-confidence vote, Khan was arrested and his supporters took to the streets in protest.

Some of the protests have turned violent, with attacks on military buildings, including the residence of the army’s top official in Lahore, which was raided, looted and set on fire.

A BBC source said Pakistani media had subsequently been told to stop broadcasting his image, name or voice.

Khan was released, but only for a few months.

He was jailed again on August 5 for failing to properly declare the sale of state gifts, but that was just the beginning.

As the election drew closer, the cases against him increased, and by early February – just days before the vote – the 71-year-old had received three long prison sentences, the last of which was 14 years.

In the run-up to the election, many of Khan’s PTI party candidates were also in prison or in hiding, and the party was stripped of its familiar cricket bat symbol, a key identifier in a country where literacy rates are 58 percent.

Nonetheless, “we were determined and wanted to make a statement,” said Salman Akram Raja, Mr Khan’s lawyer and election candidate.

“There were so many restrictions that many were unable to campaign at all. The loss of the cricket bat symbol was a big blow.”

All the candidates ran as independents, but expectations were not high even within the party.

But Imran Khan’s candidates won more seats than others, forcing his opponents to form alliances to block them, while the PTI claimed the results were rigged and ended up fighting many of the seats in court.

His supporters see the February 8 election as a turning point and evidence of Khan’s powerful message even from prison.

“Change is coming, as was stated on February 8,” Aleema Khanum said. “Change is coming. It’s in the air.”

Others, however, argue that in practical terms, the results have not changed the status quo.

“We’re in exactly the situation we would expect based on history,” Kugelman said.

“The PTI has not formed a government, its leaders remain in jail, and the ruling coalition is led by a military-backed party.”

But things certainly seem to be looking up for Khan and his supporters these days.

All three sentences handed down just before the election were set aside, a UN committee declared his detention arbitrary, and Pakistan’s Supreme Court said the PTI was an official political party and should receive “reserve seats” – reserved seats for women and non-Muslims, allocated in proportion to the number of seats the party won.

But neither has had any real impact yet: Khan remains in jail on a new case and the reserved seats have yet to be allocated.

His wife, Bushra Bibi, whose prison sentence was overturned after a case alleging their marriage was illegal was appealed, remains incarcerated on new charges.

The government, meanwhile, has made clear it sees Khan and his party as a threat to the people. Earlier this month, it announced its intention to seek a ban on the PTI, despite warnings from groups such as the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The military has also shown no signs of changing its mind. On the anniversary of this year’s May 9, a military spokesman said in a statement that it would not compromise with its “planners, promoters and perpetrators” or tolerate “fraudulent use of the country’s laws.”

And most analysts believe that smoothing this relationship with the military is what Khan really needs to do to ultimately get out of prison.

“I think we can come up with a deal that gives everybody an outlet and makes the system work,” said Khan’s lawyer, Raja.

Meanwhile, Khan has been delivering his own message from prison: Aleema Khanum said recently that he had told the army to “remain neutral and run the country” and called it “the backbone of Pakistan.”

Some commentators have seen this as an offer of reconciliation, but the use of the term “neutral” has been singled out, with Mr Abe having previously mocked the term when the military had previously declared it would not take sides in politics, saying “only animals are neutral”.

His recent call for early general elections is seen by some as one of his conditions for the military.

“I don’t think that’s very realistic,” Kugelman said. “Maybe over time Khan will soften a little bit. One of the truisms of Pakistani politics is that if you want to be prime minister, you have to curry favor with the military, or at least avoid incurring their wrath.”

For now, at least, the stalemate continues.