Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Friday awarded tickets to 10 candidates from Khyber Pakhtunkhawa who would contest the upcoming Senate elections scheduled for March 5. Samina Abid and Rabia Basra were awarded tickets against the seats reserved for women. Noman Wazir and Latif Yousafzai managed to get tickets on the seats reserved for technocrats.
Brigadier JK Williams (Retd) and Ravi Kumar would contest the polls on minorities' seats, while Mohsin Aziz, Syed Shibli, Fazal Muhammad Khan and Barrister Salman Afridi will jump into the fray on general seats on PTI tickets. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf had formed a four-member parliamentary board for Senate elections headed by PTI vice chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi comprising Shah Farman, Atif Khan and Naseem Hayat.
The party is going to take part in Senate elections for first time. It has boycotted Senate elections from Punjab and Sindh, while it has no member from Balochistan. There were reports that some members of the provincial assembly were disappointed over the award of tickets. A senior PTI leader who had also applied for Senate ticket, on condition of anonymity told Business Recorder from Peshawar that majority of the workers are upset as the party had claimed to award tickets to the ideological workers.
He lamented that those who managed to get the tickets come from the feudal background which has created panic among the workers at grassroots level, adding that the selection criteria which the party publicised before awarding the tickets is a complete to what we'd to see today.
About any resistance among the MPs after the candidates hand-picked by a committee headed by Shah Mehmood Qureshi, PTI vice chairman, he said it was just an eyewash as the names of the 'lucky winners' who managed to get the tickets had already been chosen. The PTI had received 132 applications for Senate seats of which a selection committee headed by Shah Mehmood Qureshi scanned 10 candidates - a selection which the party central leadership claims was purely on merit.
When contacted, Naseem Hayat, a member of the election committee rejected reports of MPAs giving any press conference, saying all the MPs appreciated and congratulated them for praising the selection. "We tried our level best and picked the best of the best and young people to represent PTI in Senate. And if someone is not happy, we can not do anything as it is not possible to please everybody.
This often happens when it is time to award tickets in elections, but on our part we are satisfied that we've chosen the right and honest people," she maintained. She said Samina Abid was awarded ticket as she represents three regions - Chitral, Malakand and Hazara. Samina Abid is the maternal granddaughter of Chitral's ex-Mehtar Mohammad Nasirul Mulk. She is the daughter of Nawab of Amn and speaks fluent Chitrali.
People belonging to different walks of life in Chitral lauded the award of the Senate ticket to Samina against the quota reserved for women from Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. They expressed the hope that being granddaughter of Chitralis, she would highlight the issues faced by the district vigorously.