ISLAMABAD: In a significant development, a group of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf dissidents met here on Monday and decided to launch an “intra-party reform movement to save it from disintegration and realign it with its founding ideology”.

The meeting was held at the residence of former vice president and information secretary of the PTI, Akbar S. Babar, and participants included a woman MNA of the party.

Mr Babar, who was number two in the PTI after Imran Khan until developing differences with the leadership in late 2011 over alleged corruption in the party funds, said he would announce the launching of the “internal reform movement” at a press conference in a few days.

Once considered to be a confidant of Mr Khan, Mr Babar alleged that he had been sidelined by the leadership because he had exposed “corruption and mismanagement” within the party and for his demand to set up an accountability commission.

Talking to Dawn, he alleged that the PTI had deviated from its founding principles of transparency and accountability, with the result that its rank and file was in disarray and had lost direction.

Mr Babar objected to the use of term “dissidents” for his group and said they were “genuine workers and founding members” of the PTI.

The meeting, he said, had been convened on the demand of “genuine PTI workers and office-bearers” from across the country who felt that the party and its ideology had been “hijacked” by a bunch of “rental politicians and a self-seeking mafia” which had isolated the party and led it into a blind alley.

Mr Babar said the PTI’s reins had been handed over to those people who had nothing to do with its ideology and had been switching over parties to promote their vested interests.

“Since a PTI internal inquiry report prepared by Tasneem Noorani, Ahmed Awais and Yaqoob Izhar showed that the intra-party elections were the mother of all rigged polls, there is no justification for the party’s office-bearers to continue,” he said.

In reply to a question, Mr Babar said even Imran Khan should resign from the office of the chairman to pave the way for fresh elections within the party.

“At a time when the PTI has launched a movement against rigging in last year’s general elections and is demanding resignation of the prime minister, it makes little sense for a fake leadership to continue to hold offices and lead a party which was formed to cleanse society of corruption and evil practices.”

He said the PTI’s audit report had documented little or no internal financial controls and massive corruption in the utilisation of funds. But despite serious allegations with documented proofs, not a single PTI office-bearer had been held accountable during the process of allocating party tickets in the elections.

Mr Babar said “internal decay” of the PTI must be stopped as the party had mobilised an entire generation whose hopes for “change” could not be allowed to turn into despair. He said a PTI MNA from Swat, Mussarat Ahmedzeb, represented parliamentarians of the party in the meeting and claimed that several MNAs and MPAs were in touch with him.

According to him, the participants of the meeting included Dr Muhammad Hafeez, a former general secretary of the PTI’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chapter; Khawaja Imtiaz, a founding member of the party and former president of its Rawalpindi district chapter; Hasan Shah, a founding member and former president of the Attock district chapter; Malik Mansoor Bangash, former president of the Attock district chapter; and Hikmatullah Khan, a founding member and former president of the Insaf Students Federation.

Mr Babar said he had contacted several other leading founding members and office-bearers of the PTI from different parts of the country who were expected to attend his press conference.

But a PTI spokesman said Mr Babar had nothing to do with the party affairs and was issuing such statements only to gain the media’s attention in a bid to come out of “political isolation”.

Refuting the allegations of corruption in the party funds, he said the PTI had got an audit of its bank account conducted to ensure transparency.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2014