By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The police arrested dozens of opposition activists on Sunday, including two close aides of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, as his party staged nationwide protests against what it called a rigged election last month.
Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which has the largest bloc in the National Assembly, claims it won a two-thirds majority in the Feb. 8 vote but was denied victory by the country’s election commission, which it accuses of manipulating the results. The commission denies the allegations.
Khan, who has been in jail since August 2023 on graft charges.
The election, which was marred by a shutdown of mobile phone services across the country, resulted in a hung parliament, with no party securing enough seats to form a government. The PTI and several other opposition parties have been holding demonstrations in various parts of the country for weeks, as the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party, two longtime rivals, joined forces to elect their joint candidates as prime minister and president.
PMLN chief Shehbaz Sharif was elected prime minister last Monday, while PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari was elected president on Sunday.
The PTI said that the police had arrested many of its members, including Khan’s aides Latif Khosa and Salman Akram Raja, during peaceful protests in the eastern Punjab province, calling it a violation of their democratic rights.
“We strongly condemn the arrests of the leaders and workers participating in the peaceful protest against election rigging,” Raoof Hassan, a party spokesman, said. “Peaceful protest is the fundamental right of every citizen under Article 16 of the Constitution, which the fake government imposed on the people is completely ignorant of.”
He said that the authorities were trying to lodge fake cases of terrorism against the arrested activists, who were only exercising their constitutional right to dissent.
Earlier in the day, PTI leaders mobilized rallies across the country and shared videos on social media that showed party supporters attending demonstrations in Karachi, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore, Jhelum, Peshawar, Umerkot and Toba Tek Singh.
Hassan said that his party would continue its protest movement until the reversal of the election results, which he said were based on fraudulent forms that were given to the candidates or their representatives at the polling stations.
“Two elections took place, one on the 8th of February and the other on the 9th of February,” he said. “The 8th February election was the genuine election, for which we have Forms 45.”
Hassan claimed that his party had won 181 seats in the 336-member National Assembly, the lower house of Pakistan’s parliament, and would keep protesting every two weeks until the alleged manipulation of the election results was corrected.
He said that people had come out in large numbers to join Sunday’s protests despite the arrests, especially in Punjab, the country’s most populous province and a stronghold of the PML-N.
“Concurrently, we are going to continue our battle inside the assemblies in a very robust manner and we are also going to use all legal options that we have like going to the election commission, to the tribunals, and of course, to the courts of law.”
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
