Imran Khan. PHOTO: PIXABAY
LAHORE:
Concerns are growing within PTI ranks as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi’s bid to mobilize support for Imran Khan’s release appears to be living up to expectations, with several party leaders questioning both its direction and effectiveness.
As Imran Khan’s release movement moves forward, the absence of a clear future road map has led many in the party to suspect that the ongoing registration drive may be a purely performative exercise aimed at buying time from KP CM Sohail Afridi.
“What will this registration drive achieve? If there was a plan, the KP CM should have brought it out,” asked a senior party official.
“The sad reality is that the KP CM has no plan,” he claimed. During an informal interaction, one of the officials of the parties sharply asked Sohail Afridi to make a plan after the latter had announced the formation of a liberation force but received no response.
Instead, he added that Sohail “instead of exhausting the party machinery by going ahead with his ad lib programme, should have first prepared a plan and kept it before the party leadership for discussion”.
Another Punjab official said that Sohail Afridi not only lacked a plan, but the tools used for the registration process were also deeply flawed.
According to information officially passed to him, Sohail’s team would manually register people for the movement, which, he said, raised two major concerns. One was that it could effectively create a list on which the police could target PTI supporters by obtaining data from party camps.
The other concern was the likelihood of false postings as there was no mechanism to verify records.
He added that the party’s official Rabta app was already down and according to his information, no new application had been developed to handle such a large-scale exercise.
He further said that the party had advised the CM team to seek expertise from those in the party who had conducted such registration drives in the past, but this advice “fell on deaf ears.”
He also claimed that Sohail Afridi was fast losing the confidence of PTI leaders, who increasingly viewed him as “an all-talk, no-action person”.
Meanwhile, TTAP spokesperson Akhundzada Hussain, speaking to The Express Pakinomist, said the alliance was yet to be taken into confidence on the future course of the movement.
Asked whether they had been briefed on a roadmap, he said since this was an internal PTI matter, TTAP had not been brought into the loop so far. However, he expressed hope that the party would share its trigger force plan during the upcoming leadership meeting.
However, Punjab Leader of Opposition Moeen Riaz Qureshi maintained that Imran Khan’s release motion, which the party decided about three weeks ago, was progressing.
