Imran Khan. PHOTO: PIXABAY
LAHORE:
Concerns are growing within the PTI ranks as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi’s campaign to mobilize support for Imran Khan’s release appears to be falling short of expectations, with several party leaders questioning both its direction and effectiveness.
As Imran Khan’s liberation movement progresses, the absence of a clear future roadmap has led many within the party to suspect that the ongoing registration drive may be a purely performative exercise aimed at buying time by KP CM Sohail Afridi.
“What will this registration drive achieve? If there was a plan, KP CM should have presented it,” asked a senior party functionary.
“The sad reality is that KP CM has no plan,” he said. During an informal interaction, a party functionary flatly asked Sohail Afridi to present a plan after he had announced the formation of a liberation force, but received no response.
Instead, he added, Sohail “instead of exhausting the party machinery by going ahead with his ad lib programme, should have first chalked out a plan and presented it to the party leadership for discussion.”
Another Punjab official said Sohail Afridi not only lacked a plan, but the tools used for the registration process were also deeply flawed.
According to information officially conveyed to him, Sohail’s team would manually register people for the move, which he said raised two major concerns. One was that it could effectively create a list for police to target PTI supporters by obtaining data from party camps.
The second concern was the likelihood of false entries, as there was no mechanism to verify the records.
He added that the party’s official Rabta app was no longer working and, according to his information, no new app 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 within the party who had previously conducted such registration drives, but this advice “fell on deaf ears”.
He also claimed that Sohail Afridi was fast losing the trust of PTI leaders, who increasingly saw him as “a person who only talks and does not act”.
Meanwhile, TTAP spokesperson Akhundzada Hussain, speaking to The Express PAkGazette, said the alliance is yet to be reassured about the future direction of the movement.
When asked if they had been informed about any roadmap, he said since it was an internal matter of PTI, TTAP had not been included so far. However, he expressed hope that the party would share its force release plan during the next leadership meeting.
However, Punjab opposition leader Moeen Riaz Qureshi maintained that Imran Khan’s liberation movement, decided by the party about three weeks ago, was progressing.
