Imran Khan asks party workers to step up political activities to face possible snap polls

Islamabad: Imran Khan has urged the leaders of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party to organise protest rallies in their constituencies and muster public support to force the government into announcing early general elections.

Addressing a meeting with parliamentarians from the Rawalpindi division on Monday, Khan, the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), asked the party leaders to be in "election mode" and step up their political activities to win the trust of the people.

During the meeting, party sources told the Dawn newspaper that the former prime minister floated the idea of disbanding the Punjab Assembly in the first phase and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly in the second one. The leaders, however, asked him to disband all the assemblies at the same time to enable the announcement of early polls.

Khan asked the parliamentarians to continue holding protest rallies and use them as a part of the election campaign to woo voters.

During the meeting, the PTI chairman also suggested appearing before the National Assembly speaker for verification of their resignations, the report said.

Khan has been holding many backchannel talks with the ruling dispensation for calling early elections. He has also threatened to dissolve the assemblies of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provinces if a date for the general election was not announced by December 20.

The incumbent government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party has ruled out early elections. The current term of the National Assembly will end in August 2024.

The former prime minister met his economic team at Lahore's Zaman Park residence to take stock of the economic situation of the cash-strapped country.

Khan warned that the negative trajectory of the economy would “affect the entire nation as well as the state and security institutions” and urged the Pakistan Army to “seriously think about the prevailing precarious economic situation”.

He proposed that the only way to get out of the economic quagmire was to hold early elections.

“Pakistan's economy solely depends on political stability in the country," he was quoted as saying during the meeting by the newspaper.

The PTI chairman also urged the business community, industrialists, exporters, farmers and overseas Pakistanis to raise their voices, otherwise, he said, they would equally be responsible for the country’s movement towards default.

“If I see there is no stability in the country for at least three to five years, I will not invest in Pakistan and instead stock up on dollars or buy gold to secure my capital,” the former premier explained.

Khan was ousted from power in April after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership, which he alleged was part of a US-led conspiracy targeting him because of his independent foreign policy decisions on Russia, China, and Afghanistan.

The former cricketer-turned-politician, who came to power in 2018, is the only Pakistani Prime Minister to be ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament.