LAHORE: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) leaders have strongly condemned Advocate Hamid Khan for violating party discipline and launching a slanderous campaign against senior party leaders, whose struggle they claimed helped the party reach new heights.

Advocate Khan had on Saturday addressed disgruntled party workers under the banner of Insaf Markaz and demanded party leaders Jahangir Tareen (party’s central organiser), Pervaiz Khattak (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister), former Lahore district president Abdul Aleem Khan and former PTI Sindh president Nadir Leghari be removed on charges of buying votes in intra-party elections – as recommended by party’s election tribunal headed by retired Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed.

He had also demanded party’s provincial assembly ticket holders Shoaib Siddiqui and Hafiz Farhat be removed on charges of “selling” party tickets in the Lahore cantonment elections, as was recommended by the Standing Committee on Accountability and Discipline (SCAD).

Chairing a party leaders’ meeting here on Sunday, PTI chairman’s political adviser Shoaib Siddiqui demanded the party leadership take notice of Advocate Khan’s “propaganda campaign he was doing on the instructions of their political opponents”. The meeting was attended by party leaders, including MPA Mian Aslam Iqbal, Deputy Organiser Mehr Wajid Azeem, Jamshaid Iqbal Cheema, Mian Mansha Sindhu, Mian Hamid Meraj, Mian Muhammad Iftikhar, Khawaja Jamshaid Awan, Farrukh Javed Moon, Yamin Tipu and others.

The meeting unanimously resolved that the party’s top leadership should not allow anybody to launch a slander campaign from within.

Siddiqui said Advocate Khan remained absent from all party events, including the alleged rigging case in his NA-125 constituency, and that the party workers’ struggle had helped him get relief.

The meeting demanded that those violating party discipline and launching defamatory campaigns against senior leaders should be removed from the party. They claimed almost everybody knew Advocate Khan had launched the slander campaign as he was planning to join former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s soon-to-be-launched political party.

Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2015

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