In a nerve-racking tug-of-war within the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), its president Sardar Tanveer Ilyas emerged victorious on Monday after his nominee for the AJK Council seat was preferred over another candidate backed by Prime Minister Sardar Abdul Qayyum Niazi.
Polling for the two council seats was held in the Legislative Assembly building and of the polled 50 votes Sardar Seyab Khalid of PTI secured 31 and Mohammad Hanif, the joint candidate of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), secured 19 votes.
With 32 members, the PTI had awarded its tickets to Khalid and Mohammad Asghar Qureshi, hoping against the hope that the opposition - PPP with 12 votes and PML-N with 7 votes - would contest separately thus paving the way for it to get its both nominees elected.
However, on Saturday night, PPP regional president Chaudhry Muhammad Yasin announced in a tweet that his party had agreed to support PML-N’s nominee Mohammad Hanif as joint candidate so as to ensure that the “incompetent PTI government does not get a free run.”
Following the development, the ruling PTI was left with no option but to pick any of the two ticket holders to clinch its share of one seat.
PTI sources said PM Niazi and a federal minister were in favour of Qureshi, but when Niazi summoned the parliamentary party meeting at the PM House to discuss polling related issues, much to his shock hardly 14 members turned up.
On the other hand, Ilyas also summoned a meeting of PTI legislators at a local hotel early on Monday where around 21 members were in attendance.
Speaking at the meeting, Ilyas maintained that Khalid was pledged a council seat on the occasion of PM Imran Khan’s election campaign related public meeting in Bagh city to which he stood as a witness.
The attendees, insiders said, were also unhappy at Qureshi’s nomination because many of them believed that some PTI bigwigs had pocketed little over Rs 50 million from him for the seat.
The divide in PTI was so visible that around half hour before the close of polling, none of them had cast a vote against all 19 votes polled by the opposition. The ruling party submitted an application before the election commission to enhance polling time beyond 2pm because “bad weather had hampered the travel plans of some of its members, but it was turned down after an objection by the opposition, forcing the PTI lawmakers to rush to the voting hall minutes before the closure of the gate.
Prior to that, sources said, PM Niazi kept on asking party members to vote for Qureshi, claiming that PM Imran Khan and federal minister Asad Umar had asked him on phone to convey the same message to them. However, his repeated insistence cut no ice with the legislators. On one occasion, Ilyas went on to ask him to show him the call log of his mobile to prove whether PM Khan had made him a call, the sources said.
According to sources, Ilyas had 24 lawmakers on his back and was confident that the number could increase in the event of voting between Khalid and Qureshi. However, in order to prevent exposure of internal divide, cabinet members Khawaja Farooq Ahmed, Abdul Majid Khan and Deevan Chughtai persuaded Qureshi to pull out of the fray to save the party's unity.
Though Qureshi surrendered himself to their "request" he could not hide his anger and frustration, as he was heard saying to someone in a packed room that "he had lost both his money and honour." When the PTI legislators were heading towards the voting hall, Qureshi was also heard saying to them that his money should be returned before polling.
Later, in a brief chat with media persons, Ilyas asserted that the election of Khalid was the "success of PM Khan’s vision and ideology.”
“We could have clinched the other as well, but we adhered to democratic traditions," he maintained.
Following Monday’s election, the number of PTI seats in the toothless council has increased to four while PPP and PML-N have one each seat.
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