Alvi calls for ‘forgiveness’ ahead of polls

ISLAMABAD:

President Dr Arif Alvi on Tuesday called for “ending bitterness” and giving way to cooperation and forgiveness, saying that difficult decisions needed backing of the people and their participative ownership.

According to a statement, President Alvi maintained that the forthcoming general elections provided a good opportunity to “create the vibrancy needed to rebuild our country”.
He also appreciated the statements given across the spectrum by all political leaders that there should be a level-playing field as only this single issue of inclusivity was the essence of democracy.

Alvi emphasised that the upcoming general elections should be free, fair, transparent and inclusive, saying that all political parties and their leadership should be given equal opportunities to participate in the election process to strengthen democracy in the country.

The president’s statement came at a time when the party he belonged to – the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) – was in disarray, its Chairman Imran Khan was in jail and the incumbent caretaker Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar hinted about the infamous ‘minus-one formula’.

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In an interview, the PM had recently said that fair elections could take place without Imran or hundreds of members of his party who were jailed because they engaged in unlawful activities, including vandalism and arson – a reference to the violence that rocked the country following Imran’s initial arrest in May in the Al-Qadir Trust case.

However, the interim PM added that thousands of people in Imran’s party who didn’t engage in unlawful activities, “will be running the political process, they will be participating in the elections”.

Political observers were quick to detect that the approach appeared to eerily align with the strategy of the minus-one formula, which entails the removal of a party leader while encouraging others to seize power.

“Democracy becomes meaningless if people are not able to elect leaders of their choice,” the president said while talking to former federal minister and senator Muhammad Ali Durrani, who called on him at Aiwan-e-Sadr, on Tuesday.

President Alvi and Durrani have had several meetings in the past few weeks where, as per the official statement, they discussed the political situation in the country.

Sources in the PTI, however, had revealed that Durrani was actually trying the bridge the gap between the party and political parties as well as the PTI and the powerful stakeholders after a crackdown against it in the wake of the May 9 incident when civil and military installations were attacked.

The president also earlier used his office for creating a favourable environment for Imran and the PTI but things couldn’t yield the desired results, especially, after the May 9 episode, which the army had declared a “black day”.

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Though Durrani doesn’t have any key position in the current set-up, the former senator suddenly emerged on the national political scene with his back-to-back meetings with the head of the state and subsequent meeting with the PTI leadership, among others.

Durrani has been meeting President Alvi and others to discuss his recently presented national consensus formula focusing on three key elements: Pakistan, democracy, and the armed forces, with an aim of creating the much-needed conducive environment for the elections.

In his meeting with the PTI leadership in September, an official PTI statement had stated that the PTI leadership had agreed in principal on Durrani’s three points and acknowledged his efforts for promoting political harmony in the country and solving the crisis.

The PTI had agreed to continue meeting Durrani in the future.

During the president-Durrani meeting on Tuesday, Alvi was of the view that there was a dire need for political, institutional and stakeholder unity in the country to battle the difficulties on all possible fronts, including that of the economy.

Meanwhile, PM Kakar while interacting with a group of journalists on Monday denied the impression that any deal was currently being struck between the PTI and the powerful stakeholders.

During the interaction, a journalist who attended the meeting said, PM Kakar made it clear that “there will be no institutional intervention in coming elections”.

PM Kakar’s statement resonates with the statement of former military chief Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa, who while admitting the army’s role in country’s politics, had announced in Feb 2022 that the army decided after a lot of deliberation that it would not interfere in any political issue anymore.