**Disgruntled Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf politician Akbar S. Babar has called for a fresh intra-party election while there is still time to comply with the Election Commission of Pakistan’s rules.

Speaking in Spotlight with Munizae Jahangir, Akbar S. Babar said that it was wrong to call Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s intra-party polls an ‘election’. He said that it independent observers had raised concerns over the election.

Babar said that no such election had ever been witnessed in the world where a few dozen people gathered in a room, raised slogans and completed the election.

He said that a delegation of PTI workers, inlcuding founding members, had gone to the party secretariat for nomination papers, voter lists and election rules. He claimed that the people at the party office said that the things did not exist.

Babar said that if PTI’s practices have to be compared to the practices in the Pakisan Muslim League Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party, then there was no need for the party’s existence.

Answering a question about whether democracy could exist inside the party when it was not flourishing in the country, Babar said that unless the party was dmocratised there was no room for a new party to emerge.

He said that there was still time for a fair election to be carried out in the party, but he could not be part of a fraud.

Jhagra calls Babar a ‘traitor’

Former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Finance Minister Taimur Khan Jhagra said that the real farce was Akbar S. Babar, not the intra-party poll.

He likened Babar to Ronald Wayne, a founding member of Apple, who had sold his stock and could no longer lay a claim to the company.

Jhagra said that he had been in the party for six years but had only seen him doing things against the party.

He added that Babar was playing the role of a ‘traitor’ in the game to deprive PTI of its election symbol.

The former finance minister said that the ECP itself had not managed to hold elections in the country in the constitutionally mandate period, but was ordering PTI to conduct the whole exercise in 20 days.

He also rejected Babar’s claims that the party’s workers were unhappy at the leadership, saying that crowds in KP seemed to suggest otherwise.

Asked what could happen if the ‘bat’ symbol was taken away from the party, he said that ECP was responsible for is actions and also how history remembered it.

He said that there should be a playing field if not a level playing field for everyone.