By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI), led by former prime minister Imran Khan, elected a new chairman on Saturday in a controversial intra-party election that was challenged by its opponents and some of its founding members.
Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, a close aide of Khan, won the chairman’s position unopposed, after the former cricket star nominated him for the top slot a few days ago. Khan is currently in jail, facing corruption charges that he denies.
Khan, who is serving a prison sentence for corruption, stepped down as the party head on legal grounds that could lead to losing the party’s symbol in the upcoming general elections.
The Election Commission of Pakistan, the country’s top electoral body, last week ordered the PTI to hold intra-party elections within 20 days to retain the bat as its poll symbol in the upcoming general elections, after it found that the party had violated its constitution by extending the tenure of its office-bearers without holding fresh polls.
The order came at a time when general elections are about two months away and political parties are ratcheting up their poll campaigns across the country.
The PTI, however, has complained about an uneven playing field and termed the ECP’s ruling an attempt to keep Khan and his party away from polls.
Speaking in Peshawar after his election as chairman, Gohar said he would keep fulfilling this responsibility as Khan’s representative.
He said that Pakistan had 175 political parties, all of which had been providing details of their intra-party polls to the ECP since 1960. “However, none of these polls have been scrutinised as closely as those of the PTI.”
“People are seeing this and will block the oppression,” he said. “We have to take the country forward.”
Omer Ayub Khan, a former federal minister, was elected as the party secretary-general, also unopposed. Provincially, Munir Ahmed Baloch, Haleem Adil Sheikh, Ali Amin Gandapur and Dr. Yasmin Rashid were elected as the party presidents of Balochistan, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, respectively.
The PTI’s intra-party election was criticised by its rivals, who called it a “selection, not an election”.
In a press conference in Rawalpindi, Marriyum Aurangzeb, the spokesperson of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the main rival of Khan’s party, said: “Once again, the PTI has been involved in a selection all in 15 minutes.”
Questioning how all the candidates were elected unopposed, she said: “PTI’s intra-party elections were done in secrecy.”
Aurangzeb also alleged that the PTI had failed to submit its financial records to the ECP, and demanded that the commission take action against the party for violating the law.
Meanwhile, Akbar S. Babar, one of the founding members of PTI, announced that he would approach the ECP against how the intra-party polls were conducted.
Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, he questioned what kind of elections were those in which its founding members could not participate.
Alleging irregularities in how the polls were conducted, Babar said: “We will present these facts in the ECP and submit them in detail in the coming days.”
He added it would be the ECP’s responsibility to decide on the intra-party polls after considering the material put before it. “Apart from this, if we need to go to the Supreme Court, if our lawyers think it appropriate, then we will do so but this has not yet been decided,” Babar said.
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