MQM-P PIB leader Dr Farooq Sattar reached the party's Bahadurabad office Thursday night. Photo: Geo News file

 

KARACHI: MQM-P PIB leader Dr Farooq Sattar reached the party's Bahadurabad office Thursday night. 

The disgruntled leader, who locked horns with the party's Bahadurabad faction over the nominations for Senate elections, was accompanied by his wife and Ali Raza Abidi. 

"Regardless of our disagreements, we have an ideological relationship," Sattar said during a meeting with members of the Bahadurabad faction. 

 A meeting between Sattar and Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui is underway. 

The conflict

The dispute between party members over nominations for the upcoming Senate elections had earlier resulted in the emergence of splinter groups - Dr Farooq Sattar led PIB Colony faction and the Bahadurabad group consisting of Amir Khan, Nasreen Jalil, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui among others.

Sattar was elected as the PIB's faction on March 26 after securing 9,433 votes an intra-party poll he had held in Karachi and Hyderabad. He was deposed by the Rabita Committee on February 11. 

Appeasement efforts by the Bahadurabad faction bore no fruition and the rift between splinter groups of the party got worse after the Bahadurabad group filed a petition challenging the intra-party elections held by Sattar.

 A five-member bench of the ECP, headed by Chief Election Commissioner Justice (retd) Sardar Muhammad Raza Khan, on March 26 had ruled that Sattar could no longer serve as the convener of MQM-P.

A five-member bench of the ECP, headed by Chief Election Commissioner Justice Sardar Muhammad Raza Khan, announced the brief verdict in the case pertaining to the intra-party dispute on the position of the party convener. The bench also dismissed Sattar's petition challenging the jurisdiction of ECP in the case and nullified the intra-party elections of MQM, in which Sattar was elected as the party chief.

But in a dramatic turn of events, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) dismissed on Thursday the ECP's order after Sattar challenged the order in the IHC on Wednesday.