ISLAMABAD: Asad Umar, a former federal minister and a close aide of ex-prime minister Imran Khan, announced to forgo his basic membership of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and quit politics altogether in a social media post on Saturday.
Umar is not the first PTI member to make such public proclamation since a crackdown began against his party following violent protests by its supporters on May 9 in which they vandalized government properties and military installations.
The violence was triggered by the brief arrest of former prime minister Khan on graft charges from the Islamabad High Court amid accusations by PTI leaders that his administration had been brought down a year earlier on the behest of the US authorities by the country’s military and his political rivals.
“After more than one decade in public life, I have decided to completely quit politics,” Umar said in his post. “As [I] had already stated publicly earlier that [I] disagree with the policy of confrontation with state institutions, and such a policy has led to a serious [collision] with state institutions, which is not in the interest of the country.”
“I am resigning from basic membership of PTI,” he continued. “I want to thank all those who have supported me in public life. In particular I want to thank the NA 54 [constituency] team and the voters who elected me twice.”
Several prominent PTI leaders, including Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, Shireen Mazari and Ali Zaidi, were arrested after the May 9 incident and later made similar statements in news conferences to distance themselves from Khan’s political faction.
Khan himself faces a number of cases and has been in jail since the beginning of August when a local court found him guilty illegally selling state gifts for which it sentenced him to three years in prison.
While the sentence was later suspended by higher judicial authorities, the former prime minister continued to remain behind bars since he faced a more serious case in which he is charged for divulging state secrets.
Umar, who was the planning minister in Khan’s cabinet, is also nominated in the same case in which Khan and his foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi are facing a prison trial.
The PTI says the arrests of its leaders ahead of the general elections next year in February amount to “pre-poll rigging” and constitutes an attempt to eliminate it from the country’s political landscape.
