PTI parliamentary party to choose talks or protest on Tuesday

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's parliamentary party will meet on Tuesday to decide whether the party follows a path of negotiations or begins a fresh round of protests, Senator Ali Zafar said, according to ARY News.

In a post on X, Zafar, who is the party's parliamentary leader in the Senate, said all decisions on the party's next course of action had been handed to the parliamentary party. The meeting, he said, would determine whether talks or protest would be the way forward.

He said the meeting would also take up what he described as important matters, including access to the PTI founder, the release of women, and medical treatment. The party's future strategy would also be settled there, he said.

The announcement leaves the decision with the party's legislators rather than its other forums, and comes amid an internal debate over which bodies steer PTI policy.

Earlier, PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan rejected reports that the party's core committee and political committee had been sidelined in decision-making. Speaking to ARY News, Gohar called the reports baseless and misleading and said no meeting had been held to discuss sidelining the two committees.

He said the core committee, the political committee and the parliamentary party are separate bodies within the party, and that decisions are being made by the core and political committees. Proposals from the two committees are placed before the parliamentary party, where suggestions from members of parliament are also considered, he said.

Gohar reiterated that the core committee and the political committee continue to make all party decisions and rejected the suggestion that they had been excluded from the process.

The Express Tribune reported the development under the headline that PTI would weigh talks against protest, without adding details beyond the Tuesday meeting.

PTI has been out of parliament's driving seat since 2023 and its founder, Imran Khan, has been in jail on convictions the party disputes. The party's choices between negotiation and street protest have shaped its politics since then, and Tuesday's meeting is the first formal indication since the reports of committee sidelining of how the decision will be taken.

No date beyond Tuesday, 27 October, was given for any announcement of the outcome, and neither Zafar nor Gohar said what the party's preference was.