LAHORE: According to Raoof Hassan, the party’s Federal Election Commissioner and Central Information Secretary, Barrister Gohar Ali Khan won the chairmanship without opposition when the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) revealed the results of its intra-party elections on Sunday.
Hassan announced the election results at a press conference, stating that Dr. Yasmin Rashid was declared the winner of the Punjab presidential election and Omar Ayub had secured the position of Central General Secretary.
Ali Amin Gandapur was voted as the PTI’s president for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) in the elections, while Noorul Haq Qadri and Arbab Jahandad Khan were chosen as the party’s vice presidents.
Qazi Anwar Advocate, the PTI K-P Election Commissioner, verified Gandapur’s triumph and emphasised the absence of opposition, because no nomination papers were presented by any other panel.
In other appointments, Fakhar Zaman was chosen to be Deputy General Secretary, and Ali Asghar Khan and Irfan Saleem became General Secretary and Additional General Secretary, respectively. Taimoor Khalid, Khaista Mehmood, and Daniyal Khan Jadoon are joint secretaries.
In response to questions about the election emblem “bat,” which the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had taken away from the PTI, Hassan explained that the decision was based on a petition that founding member Akbar S. Babar had filed. While Hassan confirmed that Babar has not filed any nominations for the intra-party elections, he did state that in the event that he interacts with the party, his eligibility will be taken into consideration.
Hassan restated that PTI had carried out its internal elections in accordance with the directives provided by Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
Ashraf Jabbar Qureshi and Aslam were among the candidates for the Chairman’s Panel that were present. A founding member, Qureshi declared his withdrawal in favour of Barrister Gohar, citing his trust in the latter’s leadership and the party’s endeavours to secure the release of Imran Khan, the party’s original chairman, from prison.
Aslam, another founding member, requested openness in the general election results’ release and denounced the events of May 9 and February 9.
The PTI held the intra-party elections following a protracted legal struggle in the lead-up to the general elections on February 8, during which it lost its electoral symbol of the “bat” to the ECP, a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Election Act mandates intra-party elections. The PTI’s next elections are scheduled for June 2021; the most recent one took place in June 2016. But in response to the warning from ECP, the party claimed that the Covid-19 outbreak prevented it from holding the elections, and therefore requested a further year.
On June 8, 2022, the party held elections; however, the ECP declined to recognise the results. On December 2, 2023, the PTI held another intra-party election following drawn-out proceedings at the ECP. But there were challenges to these polls in the ECP as well.
The ECP decided to deprive the PTI party of its electoral symbol after ruling once more that the elections were not conducted in accordance with the party’s constitution. PTI referred to the ECP judgement as “deeply flawed” and filed a challenge in the Peshawar High Court (PHC) as well as the Lahore High Court (LHC).
Less than a month before the 2024 elections, on January 13, 2024, a three-member Supreme Court bench upheld the ECP’s ruling, reversing an earlier PHC decision. PTI candidates ran for office as independents after the ruling of the supreme court.
