Ashraf Jabbar Qureshi is one of the founding members of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) from Karachi. His affiliation with the politics, PTI and its chairman Imran Khan spans over 26 years. Currently, he is serving as the Senior Vice President of Sindh in the party.
Discussing the beginning of his career and his first brushes with politics with ToK, Qureshi said “I first joined politics when I joined Jamat-i-Islami’s (JI) Paasbaan committee in Karachi. I became its president and then even when JI stopped its affiliation with the project, I continued to support it and remained president for another year.”
“I joined PTI when we realized that a visionary like Imran Khan needed a political platform to bring about the change that he wished to see in the country. In actual, I joined Imran Khan before the formation of his political party PTI,” Qureshi shared talking about his commitment to reforming the country and specifically Karachi into a visionary state using PTI’s platform. His commitment to the PTI is evident in the fact that he was the founding Chief of the Imran Tigers Force.
Over the course of his political career, Qureshi had been the president of PTI Karachi and Sindh separately. He was also elected the Deputy Secretary General of Sindh at one point.
Talking about Imran Khan’s visit to Mutaihda Quoami Movement (MQM), he shared “when the 1996 operation against MQM happened, I suggested to Khan that he should visit Nine Zero because he had been against the idea of holding operations against any group in urban areas. While we showed our support to them, we continued to get opposition from other political opponents.”
