ISLAMABAD: Differen­ces between two PTI stalwarts Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Jahangir Khan Tareen again came to surface when during a party meeting here on Tuesday the two leaders from southern Punjab had a heated argument and accused each other of damaging the party.

PTI chief Imran Khan immediately intervened and defused the situation.

Sources said it started when Mr Qureshi during the meeting of the senior party leaders at Banigala drew the attention of the participants towards the latest ruling of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in which it had stopped the party’s west Punjab president and former MNA Rai Hassan Nawaz from handling party affairs as he had been disqualified by the Supreme Court some three years back.

When Mr Qureshi raised questions over the decisions made by Mr Nawaz, the sources said, former PTI secretary general Jahangir Tareen, who has also been disqualified by the apex court, said it seemed that Mr Qureshi was raising the issue only to target him.

The sources said that Mr Tareen offered that if someone did not like to see him playing the advisory role as well he was ready to sit at home as he had lot of other things to do.

The sources said that Mr Tareen questioned Mr Qureshi’s contribution to the party and highlighted his own services which he had been rendering for the party as well as for chairman Imran Khan.

At this point, Mr Khan said that both Mr Qureshi and Mr Tareen were respectable and honourable leaders and that they should end their differences in the larger interest of the party.

Though Mr Tareen does not hold any party office, he has been playing an advisory role in the party since his disqualification by the SC in December last year.

When contacted, Mr Qureshi denied that he had any clash with Mr Tareen. “Nothing of this sort happened in the meeting,” Mr Qureshi said, adding that he had only raised a legal question arising out of the ECP’s recent ruling.

The Makhdoom from Multan said that he wanted the party leadership to look into a legal matter that had arisen out of the ECP’s ruling.

Mr Tareen, when contacted, however, declined to comment, saying that he did not want to discuss internal party matters in public.

“If others are doing it, it is their conscience, but I am bound by higher moral standards,” he added.

PTI’s Information Secretary Fawad Chaudhry, when contacted, tried to downplay the incident, saying that it all ended within “85 seconds”.

This was not for the first time that the differences between Mr Tareen and Mr Qureshi had come to light.

Mr Qureshi, the sources said, was unhappy over the party chairman’s act of giving important positions to Mr Tareen and Senator Chaudhry Sarwar, and believed that the two leaders were in politics only because of money.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2018