PTI says ready to defer tomorrow’s protest if meeting with IK allowed

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Sunday said that it is ready to postpone its protest scheduled for October 15 if a meeting of party senior leaders and lawyers is allowed with party founding chairman Imran Khan in Adiala Jail.

During a meeting of the PTI core committee chaired by party secretary general Barrister Salman Akram Raja, it was decided that if a meeting with Imran Khan was arranged by October 14, the protest will be postponed.

If a meeting with doctors, lawyers, or any party leader was facilitated, the protest would be postponed, said sources, adding if the meeting was not arranged, a strong protest would take place on October 15 at all cost.

During the meeting, some party members suggested postponing the protest

due to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, while others, including Shahbaz Gill and Khalid Khurshid, opposed this idea.

The party leadership and senior leaders also supported the proposal to postpone the protest.

Members stated that the ban on meetings with Imran Khan, the founder of the PTI, is a “calculated conspiracy” by the government.

They said that ruling coalition must not forget that how it threatened the then government of PTI to hold protest during a moot of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Islamabad.

They said that the then opposition parties which are now in power postponed its protest under pressure from the military as they had turned down all the requests from the then PTI government.

The federal government vowed on Saturday to deploy its “full force” to prevent the PTI from staging a protest coinciding with the SCO summit on October 15.

Ministers from the coalition have aggressively criticized the PTI, accusing it of attempting to disrupt the summit and even urging the courts to intervene.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal condemned the PTI’s protest plans at D-Chowk as “political terrorism,” asserting that the party was endangering the country’s economic recovery.

He reminded that PTI protests in 2014 had delayed the Chinese president’s visit to Pakistan.

He warned that the country could not afford to engage in destructive politics. “Just because PTI’s leader is jailed, doesn’t justify chaos,” he said.

He further highlighted that hosting the SCO summit on October 15-16 was a proud diplomatic achievement for Pakistan.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024