A file photo of PTI chief Imran Khan. PHOTO: REUTERS
ISLAMABAD: Reiterating his demand for a judicial commission to probe alleged rigging in the 2013 elections, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan on Monday threatened the government that his party would launch street agitation if the demand was not met.
“We will start a street movement till justice is delivered,” he told a press conference at his Bani Gala residence on the edge of Islamabad. The PTI chief had called off his 126-day-long protest campaign following the December 16 massacre at APS Peshawar in order to lend support to the government to deal with the menace of terrorism.
Imran said he would announce his next strategy on January 18 at the PTI workers’ convention at D-Chowk in Islamabad. “We will make it difficult for the rulers to govern,” he said of his party’s future strategy. “We will fight till [our] last breath.”
He said his party was not demanding anything but investigations by an independent judicial commission as all political parties have complained of rigging in the 2013 elections.
However, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar questioned the wisdom of PTI’s demand which “if accepted will put a question mark on the legal base of holding the 2013 elections”. He said the government has agreed to promulgate an ordinance to probe allegations of rigging but it cannot accept the demand for promulgating a ‘supra ordinance’.
Imran said it was essential to punish those who rigged the 2013 elections and their abettors in order to have free and fair elections in the future.
Referring to the election tribunal’s report on NA-122, the constituency he had lost to Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, the incumbent speaker of the National Assembly in the 2013 elections, the PTI chief claimed that as many as 34,376 bogus votes have been found.
The returning officers (ROs) knew it well that they were stealing the mandate of the people, he added. “I would once again say that the caretaker government was behind the ROs as existence of more than 34,000 bogus votes is not a mistake… it was done willfully.”
Published in The Express Tribune, January 13th, 2015.
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IK should certainly avoid such gimmicks now - we are going through a tough time; the government needs to focus on major challenges; and now since IK was busy taking care of his personal agendas during the dharna period; he is absolutely not in a position to mobilize the innocent masses any more...the fight for power needs to be set aside specially in such critical moments!