PESHAWAR: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf central information secretary Naeemul Haq has said the party will name the candidates for the next general elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa next month.

Mr. Haq told reporters at the Peshawar Press Club that the PTI would soon begin activities to organise itself in the province, while those contesting the next general elections and having resources would be assigned duties for the purpose.

Accompanied by adviser to the chief minister for information Mushtaq Ghani, MPA Shaukat Yousafzai and Peshawar naib nazim Qasim Ali Shah, the PTI central information secretary said the party needed to be more organised and hold internal elections at the earliest.

“We will hold party elections soon as if we don’t do so, then we will not be assigned the election symbol,” he said.

Mr Haq said the PTI had drafted a new manifesto in view of the fact that the PTI was emerging as a large national party.

“In manifesto, we have resolved to eliminate four menaces from the country i.e. poverty, ignorance, hatred and hypocrisy,” he said.

The PTI leader said he went to the party’s secretariat in Peshawar and would ensure that it was strengthened to hold the organisational activities and preparations for the next general elections.

He said one and a half years were not much time to prepare for general elections.

Mr Haq said though the PTI had suspended the holding of public meetings in light of terrorist threats, the party’s candidates for the next general elections would be nominated soon.

He condemned the ‘harassment and ethnic profiling’ of Pakhtuns in Sindh and Punjab and said KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak had informed him that a delegation would soon go to Punjab to take up the issue with the Punjab government for corrective measures.

“We will not tolerate any such discrimination and raise voice against it,” he said.

The PTI information secretary criticised the PML-N leaders and said the PTI was going to take Punjab CM Shahbaz Sharif to the court for changing laws to serve own interests.

He claimed Shahbaz Sharif’s sugar mills were transferred from north Punjab to southern Punjab under the changes to the relevant laws.

Mr Haq said he was hopeful that the Supreme Court’s decision in Panamagate case would be ‘based on facts’.

He criticised the PML-N government in the centre for ‘telling lies to the people’ about the national economic growth and claimed all figures produced in this respect were fudged.

“The country is going further into the debt net but the government is lying about it,” he said.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2017