After months without making any public appearances, PTI leader Taimur Khan Jhagra resurfaced at a party convention in Peshawar on Wednesday and claimed that the PTI would “sweep” the general elections scheduled to be held on February 8.

“Despite all these difficulties, PTI will sweep [the elections]. The reason for that is all of you. If you are standing then all of them are standing,” he said while addressing party workers in the provincial capital.

Jhagra also thanked “all those colleagues, workers who served time in jail, who remained standing, are still in jail”.

He thanked ex-National Assembly speaker Asad Qaiser and former MNA from Mardan, Mujahid Ali Khan, who he said were incarcerated before adding: “The one we must thank the most is Imran Khan sahib because he has been in jail for 120 days.

“And he has said that he is ready to spend a 1,000 years in jail for his nation but will not opt for a deal,” he said. The former PTI chairman has been in jail since August.

Referring to PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif, who returned to Pakistan in October after four years in self-imposed exile, Jhagra said, “The laadla (blue-eyed) who has come from London has forgotten one thing. He has forgotten that Pakistan has changed.

“The youth do not accept the laadla’s politics. The youth do not accept the politics of traitors,” he said.

“Whatever the difficulties in front of us, on February 8 we will prove that this is a free nation. KP will come out [for the polls], God willing Punjab will also come out. God willing so will Karachi, so will Sindh, so will Balochistan for Imran Khan, for their honour,” he said.

In the run up to the general elections, the PTI has complained that it is being stopped from carrying out political activities while several of its leaders have been jailed following violence in the country on May 9.

Earlier this month, President Arif Alvi had also written a letter to interim Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar and raised the PTI’s concerns regarding the “erosion of fundamental rights and a level playing field for all political parties”.

Subsequently, PTI chief Imran had penned a letter to Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa and sought the top court’s intervention to stop alleged abductions and disappearances of his party workers and journalists sympathetic to it.

The letter had also called for action against PTI’s “political victimisation” and sought equal opportunities for the party to carry out an election campaign.