A man with a plane
If there is one name that has become a gold-standard adjective for the moneyed lot that is said to have taken over the PTI, it is Jehangir Khan Tareen. Why is that so?
After all, the PTI sidelined Asad Qaiser, a man who has been with the party from the very beginning, to make the affluent Pervez Khattak (who was a provincial minister as recently as the last government) the chief minister. The party took in Azam Swati, they took in Aleem Khan. Why has Jehangir Khan Tareen become the rich man to trash?
Well, maybe because he actually does have a lot of money. In absolute terms, perhaps the others have more, but he isn’t shy of spending his. His now infamous private plane cements that image. Jehangir Khan Tareen’s private plane frontrunner in PTI internal party elections, read a recent headline of Khabaristan Today.
And he has the chairman’s ear, something which is becoming increasingly rare for the older party members, including Imran Khan’s intellectual mentor Hamid Khan.
Tareen’s seat in Lodhran, NA-154, was one of the four that the PTI had demanded extra scrutiny for. When the election commission’s tribunal nullified the election and called for by-polls, the PML-N took on board the winning candidate Siddiq Baloch, who had previously contested as an independent candidate.
It was an expensive by-poll, with both sides spending a lot of money. Jehangir Khan Tareen not only won the election but buried Baloch under a massive lead of a little less than forty thousand votes. This is despite the fact that Baloch had gathered a massive number of votes himself; more than ninety thousand.
It was the PTI’s only vindication in a long, long time. So much so that online trolls quipped that the PTI wouldn’t know what to do with all the posters against rigging that they would have instinctively printed out earlier.
Though not quite the KP de facto chief minister, Tareen does wield enough of clout in the province to bother the elected cabinet there. Add to this the fact that, as things stand now, he is party leader Imran Khan’s heir apparent.
It is another matter altogether that there would be no party to inherit were anything to happen to Imran Khan.
