Imran Khan has called his rivals PML-N and PPP “mandate thieves” (File)
Lahore:
Jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s party called Saturday’s election of the President of Pakistan “unconstitutional and unacceptable” and urged the people to hold peaceful protests across the country against poll robbery on Sunday.
Asif Ali Zardari was elected as the 14th president of Pakistan massively beating his rival Mahmood Khan Achakzai, the head of Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) and fielded by Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), which in turn is backed by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party.
Mr Khan has already claimed the February 8 polls to have witnessed the ‘Mother of All Rigging’ and called his rivals the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) as “mandate thieves”.
On Saturday, when Zardari, the PPP co-chairman and a consensus candidate of PPP and PML-N, won the presidential election hands down, almost a week after PML-N candidate Shehbaz Sharif won the prime ministerial post, Mr Khan came down heavily on the two, saying the nation will not accept the “most corrupt persons” — Shehbaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari — as prime minister and president, respectively.
“On the one hand, the newly elected President Zardari will ride to the highest constitutional position on coattails of the votes of mandate thieves and, on the other, the electoral colleges were incomplete,” PTI spokesperson Raoof Hasan said in a statement.
He said the vote of the unelected members, who took fake oaths on the stolen mandate, for the president “was completely unconstitutional and unacceptable.” Hasan also stated that a spectacle was being staged in the name of the presidential election even as the unelected members on reserved seats were sworn in by brazenly flouting the court’s clear order.
“The election for the slot of the highest constitutional position without completing the Electoral College was violative of the Constitution and unlawful.
“After the theft of the public mandate in the daylight, making the rejected people members of the National and Punjab assemblies by trampling upon the court order under their feet puts a big question mark on the independence of the judiciary,” Mr Hasan said.
The PTI spokesperson made it clear that the votes of the non-elected members and those sitting in the Assembly based on fake Form 47 in the Presidential elections would have no legal and constitutional value and status.
Both PML-N and PPP individually won less than the 92 won by independent candidates backed by Mr Khan’s PTI. As a post-poll quid pro quo alliance, the PML-N got the prime minister’s post and the chief ministership of Punjab province while PPP got the presidential post and the chief ministership in Sindh province.
Beleaguered Mr Khan’s bad luck continued as the reserved seats given to political parties based on their performance at the hustings were also denied to the SIC, into which Mr Khan’s candidates had joined.
Mr Khan and his party are all daggers drawn post all such developments as indicated by Hasan, who underscored that the only agenda to steal PTI’s mandate in the dark of the night and to deprive it of its constitutional right of the reserved seats “was to help a coalition of corrupt sneak into power and to ensure the election of the rejected person on the highest constitutional office of the country.” The PTI spokesperson recalled that those who threatened to drag each other on the streets till yesterday, as they labelled each other looters and bandits, had once again united for their vested interests to ruthlessly plunder the national exchequer anew.
He stated that the worst series of violations of the constitution and the law along with the insult of the public mandate were brazenly continued.
Mr Hasan made it clear that the Pakistani nation would never accept the most proven corrupt persons as the President and Prime Minister of the country against their will.
“The PTI will hold a peaceful protest across the country on Sunday on the call of their beloved leader Imran Khan to reclaim the stolen mandate from the mandate thieves,” he said.
Mr Khan’s party had lodged a similar protest last week coinciding with Shehbaz Sharif’s election as the prime minister.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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