Imran release drive raises eyebrows in PTI

Leaders question roadmap as Afridi's push falls flat

LAHORE:

Concerns are growing within the PTI ranks as Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sohail Afridi's drive to mobilise support for Imran Khan's release appears to be falling short of expectations, with several party leaders questioning both its direction and effectiveness.

As Imran Khan's release movement inches forward, the absence of a clear future roadmap has led many within the party to suspect that the ongoing registration drive may be a merely performative exercise aimed at buying time by K-P CM Sohail Afridi.

"What will this registration drive achieve? If there was a plan, K-P CM should have brought it forward," a senior party office-bearer asked.

"The sad reality is that K-P CM does not have any plan," he claimed. During an informal interaction, one party office-bearer asked Sohail Afridi point-blank to lay forth a plan after the latter had announced the formation of a release force, but received no reply.

Instead, he added, Sohail "instead of exhausting party machinery by moving forward with his ad lib program, should have first chalked out a plan, and kept it before the party leadership for discussion".

Another office-bearer from Punjab said that not only did Sohail Afridi lack a plan, but the tools being employed for the registration process were also deeply flawed.

According to information officially conveyed to him, Sohail's team would be manually registering people for the movement, which, he said, raised two major concerns. One was that it could effectively create a list for police to target PTI supporters by obtaining data from party camps.

The second concern was the likelihood of bogus entries, as there was no mechanism to verify registrations.

He added that the party's official Rabta App was already down and, according to his information, no new application had been developed to handle such a large-scale exercise.

He further said that the party had advised the CM team to seek expertise from those within the party who had previously conducted such registration drives, but this advice "fell on deaf ears."

He also claimed that Sohail Afridi was fast losing the trust of PTI leaders, who increasingly viewed him as "an all-talk, no-action person".

Meanwhile, TTAP spokesperson Akhundzada Hussain, speaking to The Express Tribune, said that the alliance had not yet been taken into confidence regarding the movement's future course.

When asked whether they had been briefed on any roadmap, he said that since this was an internal PTI matter, TTAP had so far not been taken into the loop. However, he expressed hope that the party would share its release force plan during the upcoming leadership meeting.

Punjab Opposition Leader Moeen Riaz Qureshi, however, maintained that the Imran Khan's release movement, as decided by the party around three weeks ago, was progressing.