ISLAMABAD: Farooq Sattar, chief of his own faction of Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P), on Thursday challenged the jurisdiction of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to hear petitions involving internal matters of the party.

During the hearing the one of these petitions filed by Kanwar Naveed Jamil — leader of a rival faction of MQM-P — in the ECP on Thursday, Mr Sattar’s lawyer, Babar Sattar, sought dismissal of the petition. He also challenged the ECP’s decision to admit these petitions for hearing.

The lawyer contended that the MQM-P’s constitution contained clauses which could resolve such issues within the party and argued that the ECP could not hear cases involving internal matters of the party.

Later, talking to reporters outside the ECP premises, Farooq Sattar took exception to the commission’s intervention. He insisted that MQM-P belonged to its workers and only they would protect it.

On the occasion, he offered to the rival faction’s chief, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, an intra-party election for the party’s convenership in a bid to unify the party and evade ECP’s intervention.

He proposed that both he and Mr Siddiqui should give up their claims on the party’s leadership and let the matter be decided through intra-party elections. Mr Sattar maintained that the issue of convenership could be resolved within the framework of the party’s constitution.

On Feb 27, the ECP gave two days to Sattar-led PIB faction of the MQM-P to submit replies to petitions filed by the Bahadurabad group led by Mr Siddiqui against it. One of the petitions asked the ECP to replace Farooq Sattar with Mr Siddiqui in its record. It pleaded that Mr Sattar had been removed as convener by two-thirds majority of the party’s Rabita Committee. Another petition challenges Feb 18 intra-party elections held under the leadership of Mr Sattar — an election that he won by a heavy margin.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2018