By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s main opposition party on Wednesday rejected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s defence of his government’s electoral legitimacy, accusing him of implicitly conceding that the February 2024 general elections were fraudulent, and called for a judicially supervised audit of the vote.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) fired back after Sharif, addressing parliament on Tuesday, drew a pointed parallel between his own government and the PTI administration that took office following the 2018 elections. Speaking in response to opposition leader Mahmood Khan Achakzai, who had branded the current government illegitimate, the prime minister argued that if the 2018 polls — which brought PTI founder Imran Khan to power — were to be accepted as valid, his own government deserved equal standing.
PTI’s information secretary, Sheikh Waqas Akram, dismissed the comparison as both disingenuous and self-incriminating.
“In a remarkable display of selective memory and political acrobatics, Shehbaz Sharif attempted to equate the current Form-47 regime with the 2018 elections,” Akram said in a statement, using the term PTI has coined to allege that official result forms were manipulated after last year’s vote. “PTI views this not as a defence but as a tacit admission that the February 2024 elections witnessed one of the most brazen thefts of the people’s mandate in the nation’s history.”
Akram argued the comparison collapsed under scrutiny. He said Imran Khan, following the 2018 elections, had publicly invited opponents to challenge results in any constituency of their choosing before independent investigators. The current leadership, he said, had shown no such confidence, retreating from any suggestion of forensic scrutiny.
“If Shehbaz Sharif truly believes his own rhetoric, why does his government recoil at the mere suggestion of an independent examination of the 2024 results?” Akram said. “The answer lies in the fragile foundation of Form-47 itself.”
He called on the government to submit to a full, transparent and judicially supervised audit of both the 2018 and 2024 elections.
The PTI’s broadside came as the party also trained its fire on the government’s flagship poverty alleviation programme, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), citing what it described as findings from the Auditor General of Pakistan’s report for the financial year 2024-25.
Akram alleged that more than 25 billion rupees had been disbursed through irregular channels, with 3.17 billion rupees spent without parliamentary approval or clearance from the Infrastructure Project Coordination Committee — a statutory requirement for such expenditures. He further alleged that data systems had been deliberately manipulated to funnel payments to more than 600,000 ineligible recipients, including government employees, diverting funds intended for widows, orphans and destitute families.
The party demanded a Supreme Court-monitored inquiry into BISP, the immediate recovery of misappropriated funds, and criminal prosecution of officials and information technology personnel implicated in the alleged data tampering. Reuters could not independently verify the figures cited by PTI, and the government had not publicly responded to the specific allegations by the time of publication.
Separately, Akram expressed alarm over the political situation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, where recent unrest involving the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has heightened tensions. He accused the federal government of responding to the dispute through “force, arbitrary arrests, and inflammatory rhetoric” rather than dialogue, warning that such an approach risked pushing the sensitive region toward “greater instability and public alienation.” The AJK government has maintained it has pursued a peaceful resolution to the standoff.
On the condition of imprisoned PTI leaders, Akram said the party would pursue all available legal avenues against the prime minister, the Punjab government and relevant prison authorities over what he described as a threat to Imran Khan’s health and life in custody. He demanded the unconditional release of all detained PTI figures, naming former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and former Punjab chief minister Dr Yasmin Rashid among those he said must be freed immediately.
Khan, who was removed from office in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022, has been in custody since August 2023 on a range of charges he and his party say are politically motivated. The government denies the allegations.
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