ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan will preside over a meeting of the party’s parliamentary board on Sunday to finalise its candidates for the upcoming Senate elections.

Talking to Dawn, PTI’s Information Secretary Shafqat Mehmood said that in the board meeting the party would finalise the list of the candidates from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province from where the party is expected to win majority of the seats.

Mr Mehmood, who himself is a member of the parliamentary board from Punjab, said that the party had already awarded its Senate ticket from the province to Chaudhry Sarwar Khan, the former provincial governor who was once a close confidant of the Sharif family.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) started receiving nomination papers from the aspiring candidates on Saturday. According to the election schedule, the candidates can submit their papers until Feb 8.

Keeping in view the party positions in all the legislatures, it is highly unlikely that the party will be able to secure any Senate seat from the three other provinces.

Interestingly, the PTI which got the representation in the Senate for the first time in 2015 is set to almost double its representation in the upper house as only its Senator Azam Khan Swati will be retiring in March.

Mr Swati had been elected as a senator on a general seat from KP which was vacated due to the death of Awami National Party’s Azam Khan Hoti in April 2015.

Sources in the party told Dawn that Mr Swati would get the party ticket again to become a senator for the next six years.

At present the KP assembly has 61 MPAs of PTI followed by 16 each of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F, and 10 from the Qaumi Watan Party of Aftab Sherpao.

Mr Mehmood categorically denied reports run by electronic media that the party had decided to award the ticket to contest the Senate elections to chief of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Sami (JUI-S), Maulana Samiul Haq. It was true that the two parties had an understanding to cooperate with each other on political matters, but there had been no such understanding on the Senate polls, he said.

The Senate comprises 104 members — 23 each from the four federating units, eight from Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), and four from Islamabad.

The 23 seats allocated to a province comprise 14 general seats, four reserved for women, four for technocrats and one for a minority member.

The term of a senator is six years, but 50 per cent of the total members retire after every three years and then the elections are held for new senators. Polls to fill the seats allocated to each province are held in accordance with the “system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote”.

The Fata senators are elected by the members of the National Assembly from the area whereas the four senators on the reserved seats from Islamabad are elected by the members of the National Assembly.

Therefore, the Senate polls always depend on the party’s position in the four provincial assemblies and the National Assembly.

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2018