Peshawar (newsviews): The debacle that befell the PTI’s recent protest march has led to serious fissures within the core committee, with demands emerging from within for chan­ges at the leadership level that can steer the party out of its current crisis.

The bad blood became public on Wednesday as two senior party leaders — Secretary General Salman Akram Raja and former KP chief minister Ali Amin Gandapur — traded accusations of betraying the party cause.

Meanwhile, a woman parliamentarian from Peshawar echoed the sentiments of many within the core committee when she demanded accountability over the failure of the party’s much-touted protest march, which resulted in the imposition of governor’s rule in KP, and created more problems for their jailed leader, Imran Khan.

The Salman Akram-Ali Amin spat on X (formerly Twitter) followed reports that a group of lawmakers from the KP Assembly had met to endorse the latter’s nomination as acting provincial president in place of MNA Junaid Akbar, who has been missing since the imposition of governor’s rule.

The handwritten text, addressed to interim party chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan and Secretary General Salman Akram Raja and seen by Dawn, said that the meeting “unanimously” proposed to nominate Mr Gandapur as the acting provincial president in the absence of Junaid Akbar, calling the ex-CM “the right man for the right job”.

The Oct 14 meeting, which according to one participant was held via Zoom and WhatsApp, was attended by around 55 provincial lawmakers. Their four-pronged agenda included party organisation issues; the status of negotiations with the government; the party’s plan for further protests; and legal issues.

The main outcome that invited derision from Mr Raja, however, was the resolution demanding that Mr Gandapur be appointed the acting provincial president immediately.

This prompted the secretary general to take a dig at “the narrative” regarding a possible announcement by a group of party MPAs, nominating a new provincial president without permission from their jailed leader Imran Khan, or the party’s political committee. He put the number of these dissidents at 68.