Imran Khan’s PTI braces to fight federal takeover of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Islamabad, Pakistan — The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party of jailed ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan is planning to legally challenge the federal government’s Sunday takeover of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that the party governed.

Sheikh Waqas Akram, the PTI’s central information secretary, told Al Jazeera that the party would challenge the imposition of emergency laws — suspending civil liberties — and governor’s rule in the province in court on Tuesday. A petition had been drafted by a legal committee headed by PTI secretary general Salman Akram Raja, but Akram did not say whether it would be filed in the Supreme Court or the Federal Constitutional Court.

The federal government’s moves have emerged as Pakistan’s latest political flashpoint, with competing narratives from the government and the PTI, at a time when the party was in the middle of a delayed march towards Islamabad, aimed at pressuring authorities to release former PM Khan, who has been in incarceration for more than three years.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi on Monday justified the government’s moves by arguing that federal rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was needed for Pakistan to effectively combat “terrorism” in the province that shares a porous border with Afghanistan.

“No war can be won, however many resources you bring, whatever you do, until the government there leads it,” Naqvi said in Peshawar on Monday.

On Sunday, President Asif Ali Zardari imposed emergency rule and governor’s rule, suspending the PTI government in the northwestern province. The party has governed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2013.

Sohail Afridi, the suspended chief minister, and some members of his cabinet have been taken into preventive custody, Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry confirmed on Monday. Afridi had been leading the march towards Islamabad seeking to free Khan, and despite the setbacks to the party, PTI leaders said the protest was still on.

“The long march has not ended. But a historic crackdown against the party has begun,” Akram said.

The case for intervention

According to the proclamation signed on Sunday, the provincial government had “failed to demonstrate the ownership, will and intent to adequately deal with the menace of terrorism”.

“The federal government’s position is clearly described. ‘A deliberate disengagement from the fight against terrorism’ as communicated after cabinet meeting. That’s the constitutional premise needed for imposition of emergency,” Aasiya Riaz, joint director of the independent political think-tank the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT), told Al Jazeera.

However Hassan Abdullah Niazi, an adjunct faculty member at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and a lawyer based in Lahore, disputed that premise.

“If all of this was true then KP would be in a state of anarchy, but we know that is not the case. It had a functioning legislature and executive that commanded the confidence of the people, hence this entire exercise is an unconstitutional move against provincial autonomy,” he told Al Jazeera.

A more detailed case was set out last month in a 14-page white paper presented in Islamabad by Ikhtiar Wali Khan, a political advisor to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN).

The paper pointed to rising police deaths, staff and equipment shortages in the provincial counterterrorism department, and spending priorities.

However, Akram rejected the charge that the PTI had failed to lead the fight.

He said the provincial government had paid 1.83 billion rupees ($6.6 million) from its own funds to the families of more than 900 soldiers, police and paramilitary personnel killed fighting armed groups, a contribution he said no other province had made.

What Islamabad wanted

Naqvi said at a news conference in Islamabad on Sunday that the federal government had been involved in negotiations with the PTI on a proposed “sit-in” by the party in support of Khan.

“We have no problem with the sit-in. Do the sit-in as eagerly as you like, we have no issue with the sit-in. Our issue is entirely terrorism-related, and we want to get you on board on that,” he said.

Taimur Jhagra, a PTI leader and former provincial finance minister, also said the talks with the government that the party had agreed to were meant to focus on Khan.

“It’s absurd that a negotiation about a protest movement to give Imran Khan Supreme Court-ordered medical and visitation rights becomes a negotiation about terrorism strategy,” he told Al Jazeera.

Naqvi also said the PTI had agreed during the talks that emergency rule should be imposed in 12 districts of the province.

Akram rejected that claim and said the party had refused. The party feared residents would bear the cost of military operations, he said.

“We said ‘No, this cannot be. You cannot do whatever you like with them. We took the votes from them. Tomorrow they will blame us: you got us killed’,” he said.

Akram said the PTI negotiators referred the federal government’s proposal to Afridi, who rejected it.

Federal Information Minister Attaullah Tarar went further at Sunday’s news conference.

“This government, which has been suspended through a constitutional option, is responsible for the deaths of thousands of citizens of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” he said, accusing Afridi’s PTI government of being hand in glove with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan — an armed group known as the Pakistani Taliban — and the Afghan Taliban.

There is no known — leave alone public — evidence of any such links.

Security or politics?

According to a government white paper, 122 police personnel were killed in the province in the first half of this year, up from 63 during the same period in 2025.

Independent trackers also point to rising violence. The Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), an Islamabad-based think-tank, recorded 556 violence-linked deaths in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between July and September, up from 475 in the previous quarter and 311 in the one before.

Balochistan was hit harder. Deaths there rose by 213 percent to 829, making it the worst-affected province, according to CRSS.

The government says it acted because the provincial administration would not lead the fight against armed groups, but analysts disagree over the takeover’s purpose.

“I would say this decision is political, administrative and security. All three elements are present in it,” Zaigham Khan, an Islamabad-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

Ali Arqam, a longtime observer of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, disagreed.

“This is not really about security at all. It is basically a political move that they are just dressing up as some kind of administrative necessity,” he told Al Jazeera.

Jhagra said the government believed the takeover would break the PTI, but argued that people across the country still saw Khan as their leader.

“It is trying to solve for legitimacy,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to the government.

For his part, federal law minister Azam Nazeer Tarar said at a news conference in Islamabad on Sunday that the decision was a purely constitutional step.

A party under pressure

For the PTI, the immediate concerns are its leaders and the courts.

“There has been no contact. No one in the party has had any contact with the chief minister,” Akram said.

But the party remains widely popular — in the province and nationally.

At Monday’s meeting, Naqvi said results against “terrorism” would not come in a day. There would be ups and downs, he said, and harder times lay ahead.

But Arqam, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa observer, said Islamabad should be judged by the same measures as the PTI government.

“You test this government by looking at the exact same hard metrics: Does security actually improve, do the basic services get better, and do the promised fiscal resources finally show up?” he said.