PTI reassigns election tickets on 21 Punjab seats

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Wednesday withdrew tickets issued to candidates in 21 Punjab Assembly constituencies and assigned them to new candidates, Aaj News reported.

The decision comes in the wake of internal disagreements and protests over the allocation of tickets announced last week by the party chief.

“At least 21 tickets have been reassigned while 9 new tickets have been issued in the constituencies where no candidate had been announced by the party,” PTI Secretary General Asad Umar said in a tweet on Wednesday.

“A decision about a total of 30 tickets was made,” he said.

PTI’s official Twitter handle also shared an updated list of 31 constituencies from North Punjab, Central Punjab, West Punjab, and South Punjab. West Punjab constituency PP-118 remains open after the ticket issued to one candidate was withdrawn.

The party withdrew the ticket given to Tayyaba Ibrahim in the PP-10 Constituency of Rawalpindi and assigned it to Colonel (retd) Ajmal Sabir. The opposition candidate in this constituency is Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

The ticket given to Hafiz Attaullah has now been given to Nadeem Aftab Sandhu in PP-108 Faisalabad.

In PP-185 Okara, Rao Hassan Sikandar was replaced with Chaudhry Saleem Sadiq to represent the party in the election.

Also, Shaheer Rao has been replaced with Hasaan Ahmed in constituency PP-101.

The fate of constituency PP-118 has not yet been decided as this constituency remained open after the ticket issued to Chaudhry Bilal Asghar Waraich was withdrawn.

The election ticket in PP-73 also changed hands from Malik Khaliq Daad Palhar to Suhail Akhtar Gujjar.

Nazeer Ahmed becomes the new ticket holder of PP-79 Sargodha, which was previously awarded to Faisal Ghumman.

The PP-57 ticket has been given to Rana Ali Waqeel Khan and the PP-162 ticket to Fayaz Bhatti.

Secretary General Asad Umar issued tickets after the approval of PTI chief Imran Khan.

On April 21, former prime minister Imran Khan took to Twitter to announce that he will begin the ticket review process after groups of PTI workers staged protests at his Zaman Park residence in Lahore.

The PTI chairman said he had formed four reconciliation committees for this purpose, and he will personally review the cases sent to him by these committees.