ISLAMABAD - The parliamentary board of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is between a rock and a hard place to decide the party’s electoral candidates for the elections throughout the country and especially in Punjab as there was infighting within the party between its old guards and newcomers over the distribution of tickets.

Sources aware of the development said that the party was facing a tough situation over the distribution of tickets and feared it may lose many old party candidates when the parliamentary board will announce the final decision regarding the award of tickets for seats of National Assembly and provincial assemblies.

It is expected that the parliamentary board will announce its first list of ticket holders today for Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhaw, Sindh and Balochistan after a delay of two days. Earlier, the board had announced tickets for some constituencies of Sindh and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Background interviews with a number of PTI leaders indicate that a difficult situation has emerged following the party leadership’s decision to take a number of electables from south Punjab, central Punjab and other parts of the country into its folds during the last more than two months. The party leadership had brought these electables into the party with the promise of awarding tickets to them. But many old guards of the party want tickets for themselves in a number of constituencies.

A PT leader said that the party already, as a pre-emptive measure, had asked all of candidates seeking party tickets to submit an affidavit along with their applications that they could not part ways with the party in case tickets were denied to them. He said that as this affidavit had no legal binding on the candidates so they might opt to contest the election as independent candidates after being denied tickets by the party.

PTI recently, through an official announcement, has made public the list of the candidates who had been given tickets in Sindh and FATA. Famous anchorperson Dr Amir Liaquat who had joined PTI some weeks back has recently indicated to quit PTI after coming to know that he had been denied ticket.

From the last two days, PTI’s Central Media Department is kept in changing the date and timing of the announcement of the party regarding the award of tickets and this gives credence to the belief that the parliamentary board is facing a very difficult situation.

PTI Secretary Information Fawad Chaudhry while addressing a press conference on June 5 had said that the party would release the complete list of its election candidates on June 6 (Wednesday) and a list being circulated on the social media in this regard was fake.

However, the PTI secretary information on Wednesday said the parliamentary board had yet to decide the tickets on one third seats out of the total despite its lengthy sessions.

On Thursday, Chaudhry in a statement said that after threadbare deliberation of six days, the parliamentary board had completed the process of award of tickets for 60 percent of constituencies out of total ones and the remaining had yet to be decided. He said that the list of candidates would be issued on Friday morning.

Iftikhar Durrani, the head of Central Media Department of PTI, however, denied the impression that there were any rifts within the party over the distribution of tickets. He said that all the meetings of the parliamentary board were closed door and no conversation of the board had been made public. “We have to shortlist 1100 candidates for National Assembly and provincial assembles seats out of 5000 applications and it is an uphill task to scrutinize the applications,” he said adding that the preparation of lists of special seats for women and minorities was a separate task that the parliamentary board was doing. He said that the board had been meeting for the last six days from 2 pm to 2 am daily.

IMRAN MUKHTAR