By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party led by former prime minister Imran Khan, announced on Thursday that it would hold intra-party elections on March 3, after its previous polls were rejected by the country’s top court.
Khan, jailed on corruption charges, nominated Barrister Ali Zafar, a former law minister, as the candidate for PTI chairman, a position he has held since the party’s inception in 1996.
Zafar is expected to win the election unopposed, as no other candidate has filed nomination papers so far.
The party’s decision to hold fresh elections came after the Supreme Court upheld the verdict of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) that declared the PTI’s previous polls in December invalid. The ECP had found that the party had violated its own constitution and electoral rules by conducting the elections through a show of hands instead of secret ballot.
As a result, the PTI was deprived of its election symbol, ‘bat’, and had to contest the general elections on Feb. 8 through independent candidates. The party managed to retain its majority in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, but lost several seats to the opposition parties, especially the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).
The PTI had initially planned to hold intra-party elections on Feb. 5, three days before the general elections, but then withdrew the decision, citing security concerns and logistical issues.
The elections will be held in Islamabad and all the provincial capitals, i.e. Lahore, Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar and over six million party members will be allowed to cast their votes physically.
He said that PTI leader Raoof Hasan had already been nominated as the party’s federal chief election commissioner and there would be four provincial commissioners to supervise the polls.
Scrutiny of the nomination papers submitted will be done on Feb. 24 and 25 and names of the candidates will be announced on Feb. 26. Finally, elections will be held on March 3 and the election results will be declared by 8 p.m. on election day and will be notified on March 4.
However, the party’s decision to hold intra-party elections has been challenged by one of its founding members, Akbar S. Babar, who has filed a petition in the ECP, alleging that the party had not amended its constitution and electoral rules as per the court’s orders.
Babar, who has been estranged from the party since 2011, has also accused the party of receiving illegal foreign funding and misusing public funds. He has demanded that the ECP conduct an audit of the party’s accounts and bar it from holding any elections until the completion of the inquiry.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
