KARACHI: After much deliberation, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) has decided not to hold their much-hyped political gathering on April 19 at the famous Jinnah ground in Azizabad; they will instead hold the rally at Shahrah-e-Pakistan, PTI leader Imran Ismail announced on Saturday.

Addressing a press conference, Imran Ismail said that the party's core committee, in a meeting, decided not to hold the party’s rally at Jinnah ground, owing to administrative issues. He explained that the roads leading to Jinnah ground are and narrow and crowded and the party wanted “to avoid any mishap.”

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Ismail totally rejected the rumors that PTI received any threats after which it decided to change the venue of political gathering. He further said, “We don’t need the help of Muttahida Qaumi Movement, PTI will conduct this rally on its own”.

It is still not confirm that the rally will be held at Shahrah-e-Pakistan, since PTI has not received the official permission for it yet. However, the PTI candidate for NA-246 said he is hopeful that they will soon be granted official permission to hold rally on the boulevard.

Earlier, the PTI candidate for the by-election on NA-246, Imran Ismail, had said their rally on April 19 would most probably be held in the Jinnah ground if they could not manage to hold the rally at any other bigger and more spacious venue.

PTI chief Imran Khan, who visited Karachi few days earlier, had hinted that their public meeting could not be held in the Jinnah ground as it was not large enough to accommodate “hundreds of thousands of PTI supporters”.

Ismail, however, said Imran Khan only asked him to find a better venue or hold the rally wherever he decided.

The by-polls in NA-246, scheduled to be held on April 23, are expected to be a three-way contest between Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf's Imran Ismail, MQM's Kanwar Naveed Jamil and Jamaat-i-Islami's (JI's) Rashid Naseem.

The NA-246 constituency of Karachi is made up of areas that have been at the centre of political power in the city for over 26 years now.

The constituency has a number of heavily populated concentrations of Urdu-speakers (also known as Mohajirs) that first began to settle in these areas from 1953 onward.

Most of these concentrated clusters belong to the middle and lower-middle classes of the city, and the literacy rate in this constituency is also one of the highest in Karachi.