Public rally: Imran asks govt to accept his demands by Nov 30 or else …

PTI chief says PM will be responsible, if anything happens after Nov 30.

NANKANA SAHIB:

Setting another deadline for the government to probe the ‘massive rigging’ in the 2013 elections, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan said if his party didn’t get justice, it would become difficult for the prime minister to stay in power past November 30 – the day the party is scheduled to stage a ‘decisive rally’ in the federal capital.

“People from all over the country will converge in Islamabad on November 30 and they will make it difficult for the government to stay on. If anything happens [after that], then the sole responsibility will be on [Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif,” Imran told thousands of supporters at a big rally in Nankana Sahib.

Referring to his demand for giving top military intelligence agencies a role in the proposed electoral fraud probe, Imran claimed that Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had agreed in a meeting with Shah Mehmood Qureshi to four out of six PTI’s demands and the only sticking point was resignation of the prime minister. “How can Nawaz Sharif now declare my demands unconstitutional?”



Nawaz said on Wednesday that he was at a loss to understand Imran’s demand to include officials of the Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence in a proposed Supreme Court-led commission to ensure a free and fair audit of the elections.

The PTI leader said his party’s only demand was a fair investigation. “We have asked the prime minister to resign only if rigging is proved. And if rigging is not proved, then we will call off our protest. We are not creating any hurdles for the prime minister now,” he said.

Imran reiterated his allegations that the elections were massively rigged in favour of the PML-N.  “We know how the vote-bank of Nawaz Sharif multiplied from 6.8m [in 2008] to 150m [in 2013]; how ballot papers were printed; in which constituency the returning officers were controlled by whom and which media supported the government to hide facts,” he claimed.

Imran also hit out at the PPP and alleged that it also rigged the elections in Sindh. “Both the PPP and PML-N will be in trouble [in case of fair investigation] because they had fixed this match through a mutual understanding,” he said.

He said Nawaz Sharif could have easily resolved this issue. “At first we had only demanded audit of four constituencies. They should have allowed recounting of votes the way we did in Peshawar when we got an application against our MPA Shah Farman,” he added.

He asked why National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq did not let allow a vote audit in his constituency and why he was hiding behind a stay order from the court. “It will not augur well for the country, if the court rules after three years that Ayaz Sadiq did rig the elections,” he said.

The PTI chief said his party wanted to see an independent judiciary in the country which could set an example by punishing the high and mighty. He justified his complaints from the judiciary which, he said, didn’t give him justice in nineteen months.

Commenting on the lynching of a Christian couple in Kot Radha Kishan, he said: “We’ll protect every weak person in the country. In the Naya Pakistan, everybody will have equal rights.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2014.