ISLAMABAD — Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s parliamentary party was set to meet on Tuesday to decide whether the party negotiates with the government or returns to protest, as senior PTI figures publicly disagreed over how much decision-making power has actually been handed to the parliamentary forum, according to Pakistani media reports summarised on October 26–27.
Barrister Ali Zafar said decision-making powers had been handed to the parliamentary party. PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan and the party’s information secretary, Sheikh Waqas Akram, publicly denied a wholesale transfer, saying the party’s core and political committees retain authority over most decisions. The Tuesday meeting was billed as the immediate test of which account prevails, with the agenda covering negotiations, access to the party’s jailed founder Imran Khan, and protest strategy.
The dispute comes while the party is fighting the emergency and governor’s rule imposed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on October 11, which removed the PTI-led provincial government. PTI says the measures have been followed by raids, arrests and the removal of party flags, which it describes as political reprisal — claims the government disputes. The party also says several of its elected members, including former chief minister Sohail Afridi, Babar Salim Swati, Junaid Akbar Khan and Khalid Khurshid, have not been produced in court and remain unaccounted for after about 15 days, and it is demanding their immediate recovery and access to lawyers. Those are the party’s claims; the authorities have not confirmed the members’ whereabouts in the reports summarised here.
Gohar has already challenged the KP emergency in the Peshawar High Court and called its imposition a "grave political mistake," arguing that the province’s electoral mandate must be respected. Speaking outside Parliament House on October 23, he said: "You took the fortress built on our mandate by imposing governor’s rule and emergency, but how long will you keep it? This fortress belongs to Imran Khan and our people." He also welcomed an Apex Committee meeting in Peshawar and said there could be no disagreement over eliminating terrorism, while maintaining that the province should receive its full constitutional share of federal funds.
The federal government has defended the emergency on security grounds, saying the provincial government had disengaged from the fight against terrorism, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif defended the move in remarks Zark News reported on October 24, in a dispute that also involves Rs160 billion the PTI says the federation owes the province. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar has said talks would not take place with the PTI outside parliament and without Imran Khan’s exclusion — a condition PTI leaders, who demand unrestricted access to their founder, have rejected as unconstitutional.
What the parliamentary party decides on Tuesday will shape the party’s next phase: a negotiating track through parliament and the courts, a return to street mobilisation of the kind the party attempted in September and October, or a contested mixture of both if the leadership dispute is not settled. Imran Khan remains in Adiala Jail, and the party’s sisters-of-the-founder detention case in Lahore — in which the Lahore High Court disposed of a recovery petition on Monday after the Punjab government disclosed a further 30-day detention extension — continues to run in parallel. Read the leadership-dispute summary at particle.news.
