Three PTI ministers given party offices in KP

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan has notified appointments of three administrators of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s as many regions. This is against PTI’s principle of partymen not wearing two caps at one time, as all these are already ministers in Chief Minister Pervaiz Khattak's cabinet.

Imran had vociferously asked then PTI secretary general Pervaiz Khattak to surrender the party post in 2013 after becoming chief minister of KP. Similarly, Assad Qaiser, who was PTI’s provincial president, also had to quit his party post on being elected Speaker of KP Assembly following the general elections that year. Shaukat Yousafzai, Ali Amin Gandapur and Atif Khan were among those, who relinquished party posts as secretary general of KP, president south region KP and president Peshawar region respectively and some others as well.

The underlying principle was that an individual serving in the government should not hold another office. It was widely appreciated within the party and outside. Though, Khattak and some other PTI leaders were unhappy over application of this principle on them.

The PTI’s three men, who have been assigned key party responsibility in KP, are already provincial ministers: Shah Farman, who has been made president of PTI’s Peshawar region, holds the ministerial post of Public Health Engineering;Mehmood Khan, who is Minister for Irrigation, has been made president of Malakand region and Ali Amin Gandapur, who has been notified as president south region of the province, holds portfolio of Revenue and Estate.

A few days back, a PTI notification on appointment of four regional presidents in Punjab had also surprised many, as three of them have been part of Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), a party, the ex-president General (R) Pervez Musharraf claims, he had formed; ironically, now these will be functioning directly under the party chairman.

Not only this, the PTI’s notified secretary general Jehangir Tareen, who served as minister for industries and production during the Musharraf regime, will also have an eye on the presidents. Needless to say, the PTI and PML-N have the largest number of politicians, who were one way or the other, part of the PML-Q, like Haroon Akhtar, Talal Chaudhry, Amir Muqam, Riaz Pirzada and Marvi Memon.

Coming back to the three notified as PTI presidents and starting with the south, Ishaq Khaqwani, who served as PML-Q’s minister of state for railways, has been made PTI’s president of this part of Punjab. Khaqwani, though, is known for calling a spade a spade and hence was not among favourites of Musharraf.  The central region of this largest and most important province in terms of its 148 directly elected seats of the National assembly has been given to Abdul Aleem Khan, who also served as PML-Q provincial minister and afterwards joined the PTI. As for the west region, it will be looked after by Chaudhry Muhammad Ashfaq, who served as district nazim from the platform of PML-Q.

The Rawalpindi and Sargodha divisions, which fall under the northern region, the party chairman has named an old campaigner Amir Kiyani to take care of. It is another issue that this region will be very difficult to manage in view of simmering divisions at different levels of party cadres.

Last but obviously not the least, in Punjab, Imran has heavily relied on relatively newcomers to do the magic in the run up to next general elections, overlooking veterans such as Ijaz Chaudhry and Mehmoodur Rashid.

When contacted, the PTI central information secretary Naeemul Haq told The News that previously what his party did to Khattak and others in 2013 was a strategy and not a principle. “The PTI has always adopted pragmatic policies in trying to manage the biggest party in Pakistan and sought the best people available for the job,” he contended, when asked was not it Imran’s U-turn on this count that he discouraged holding of dual office and now he opted for it.