Imran Khan. PHOTO: PIXABAY
LAHORE:
Concerns are growing within the PTI ranks as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi’s drive to mobilize support for Imran Khan’s release appears to be falling short of expectations, with several party leaders questioning both his direction and effectiveness.
As Imran Khan’s freedom movement progresses, the absence of a clear roadmap has led many in the party to suspect that the ongoing registration drive could be a mere performative exercise to buy time by KP CM Sohail Afridi.
“What will this registration drive bring? If there was a plan, the KP CM should have presented it,” asked a senior party leader.
“The sad reality is that the KP CM has no plan,” he said. In an informal exchange, a party official immediately asked Sohail Afridi to present a plan after the latter announced the formation of a liberation force, but received no response.
Instead, he added, Sohail “instead of exhausting the party machinery by pushing his agenda ad lib, should have first drawn up a plan and submitted it to the party leadership for discussion.”
Another Punjab official said that not only did Sohail Afridi lack a plan, but the tools used for the registration process were also deeply flawed.
According to information officially given to him, Sohail’s team is manually recording people participating in the movement, which he says raises two major concerns. One of them was that it could effectively create a list for the police to target PTI supporters by obtaining data from the party camps.
The second concern was the likelihood of false entries, 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 app had been developed to handle an exercise of such magnitude.
He further said that the party had advised the CM’s team to seek the expertise of those within the party who had already 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 viewed him as “a person who talks and does not act”.
Meanwhile, TTAP spokesperson Akhundzada Hussain, speaking to The Express PK Press Club, said the alliance was yet to be given confidence about the future direction of the movement.
When asked if they had been informed of any road map, he said that since it was an internal matter of the PTI, the TTAP had not been made aware of it so far. However, he expressed hope that the party would share its plan to release the forces at the next leadership meeting.
Punjab Opposition Leader Moeen Riaz Qureshi, however, maintained that Imran Khan’s freedom movement, as decided by the party around three weeks ago, was making progress.
