Recriminations grow over failure of PTI protest plan

• Salman Akram Raja tries to quell talk of ‘disagreement’ among core committee members • Insiders say march date was announced without consultation; protest plans kept under wraps, even from party leaders ISLAMABAD: Controversy over its failure to hold a protest march continues to plague the PTI, with the fallout suggesting differences within its leadership over who is to blame for the botched mobilisation , even as party leaders continued to publicly deny any disarray. With questions mounting, PTI Secretary General Salman Akram Raja turned to social media on Sunday to play down talk of a “disagreement” during a meeting of the party’s core committee and to answer the allegations made against Sohail Afridi, the non-functional chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“There should be no ambiguity,” Mr Raja wrote on X, calling Mr Afridi “a brave young man” who has stayed steadfast with the ideology of PTI founder Imran Khan. He said, however, that the administrative aspects of the protest march needed to be critically reviewed to counter the “narratives” being propagated against Mr Afridi. He accused critics of presenting core committee discussions “out of context” and distorting them as part of “conspiratorial narratives”. Meanwhile, a senior party leader who attended the meeting and spoke to Dawn on condition of anonymity, painted a less rosy picture. The leader said the party’s core committee meetings had started to discuss why the protest march failed and that the discussion was still ongoing. “On Saturday night, the meeting started after 10pm and ended after 2am. As many as 16 members of the committee got an opportunity to speak, and the remaining will speak in upcoming sessions,” he said. “At the outset, PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar said the meeting was called to…