Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Secretary General Salman Akram Raja on Tuesday said he and several other party leaders have been barred from entering Gilgit-Baltistan, where they were to join the ongoing campaign for the June 7 elections.
In a post on X, Raja alleged police had stopped him, Naeem Panjutha and Shaukat Basra from entering GB. He further claimed the deputy superintendent of police had his name on a list of blacklisted individuals. “We, along with friends who had come from ISF, have been surrounded by police vehicles and expelled from the province,” he wrote.
In a continuation of the post, he said his name, along with those of the people with him, had been given to police to stop their entry into GB. “The foundational relationship between the public and the state, formed on the basis of votes, has been broken,” he added.
Separately, the PTI also commented on the situation from its official X account. The party alleged GB police had stopped its leaders at the first checkpoint as soon as they entered Gilgit. Panjutha, similarly, alleged the PTI was being prevented from campaigning, lamenting that authorities sometimes withdrew the party symbol and others times conducted raids on their homes. “Everyone else is being allowed vehicles, but we’re not being let go,” he alleged.
The latest incident of some of the party’s leaders facing restrictions on campaigning in GB comes after the party’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa president, Junaid Akbar Khan, was detained and then directed to leave GB for failing to secure a no-objection certificate. Similarly, former National Assembly speaker Asad Qaiser has claimed authorities blocked roads in Islamabad to derail his plans to fly to Skardu to participate in the campaign. However, PTI Chairman Gohar Ali Khan has been permitted to campaign and has been participating in various events for the past several days.