ISLAMABAD: As the PTI reels from a recent court ruling that deprived the party of its reserved seats, a close aide to party founder Imran Khan sees `institutional manipulations and internal miscalculations` particularly the entire intra-party polls episode to `politically eliminate` Mr Khan under the so-called minus-Imran plan.

In an interview with Dawn, Niazullah Khan Niazi, who is the spokesperson for the incarcerated party chief and his spouse, claimed that a `comprehensive and deliberate scheme` is being executed to sideline the former premier.

`This is a political coup, orchestrated with the help of legal engineering and internal betrayal. Sadly, the silence and inaction of our own leadership made it possible,` he alleged.

These alleged machinations are not merely a result of external pressure or judicial overreach but also due to betrayal within PTI`s own ranks, he opined. Mr Niazi said that a `coordinated political engineering operation` was undertaken, bringing together elements within the PTI leadership, judicial decisions and actions by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to remove the PTI founder from the political arena.

`Self-inflicted wound` Mr Niazi`s conversation with Dawn comes against the backdrop of the constitutional bench ruling in the reserved seats case, and he dubbed the party`s actions, such as the `flawed` PTI intraparty polls, leading up to this decision a `self-inflicted wound`.

Interestingly, Mr Niazi, who oversaw these intra-party elections as PTI`s federal chief election commissioner, blames a group of party leaders for a series of mistakes, which culminated in the disintegration of their numerical strength in the legislatures.

Recalling the events, he claimed that the party`s act of barring over half a dozen hopefuls from contesting provided the legal grounds to the ECP to invalidate the results, and ultimately led to the Supreme Court stripping PTI of its electoral symbol.

The individuals in question includedAkbar S. Babar, Mehmood Khan, Noreen Farooq, Bilal Azhar Rana, Muhammad Muzammil Sindhu, Ahmed Hassan, Muhammad Yousaf, and Asadullah Khan.

Apart from Mr Babar, who also brought the infamous foreign funding case against the party the other candidates were not prominent political figures.

There is no love lost between the PTI and Mr Babar, who have been at loggerheads ever since he was shown the door, and has tried every legal trick in the book in a bid to stake his claim to the party.

But Mr Niazi claimed that the decision to exclude him and other hopefuls from taking part in intra-party polls was taken without consulting him.

He called this `a premeditated act of internal sabotage`, as these were the very individuals who eventually appeared before the Supreme Court. Their testimony was among the reasons that the bench led by then-CJP Qazi Faez Isa ruled against the party, he asserted.

Under PTPs own election framework, candidates are required to contest elections in panels. According to Mr Niazi, had these individuals been allowed to contest, their nomination papers would not have withstood scrutiny and would have been rejected , thereby safeguarding the legitimacy of the process.

Mr Niazi maintained that he had previously conducted successful intraparty elections twice, in 2009 and 2012, when he was the regional head of PTI Islamabad, and those results were certified by the ECP.

When quizzed on why he didn`t raise this issue earlier, he claimed that he was unaware that these eight candidates wanted to contest the intra-party elections and only came to know on polling day.

The incarcerated party founder was bravely facing all the odds, but certain leaders still prefer to maintain the status quo instead of exposing the judiciary-establishment nexus and mobilising all the resources to get relief for their detainedleader,he added.

`I was not informed of the disqualifications until election day. This concealment was deliberate,` Mr Niazi alleged, adding that he had subsequently raised this issue with the party leaders, but to no avail.

Asked why he had chosen to go public with this information at this juncture, Mr Niazi said he believed the time had come `to expose such elements`.

About Mr Niazi`s assertions, PTI CIS Sheikh Waqqas Akram blamed the `system`, not the people in PTI. `[The] fact is that there is no one within the party who wants to minus Imran Khan. Even Aleema Khan has clarified that she was talking about the system, and not personalities in PTI. It is a fact that the system has been trying to minus Imran Khan for such a long time,` he said.