Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar. PHOTO: FILE
ISLAMABAD:
Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz Aaeen-e-Pakistan (TTAP) blasted the government and state institutions on Saturday, alleging that the constitutional order, electoral system and judicial authority in the country have been rendered meaningless.
Addressing a press conference, Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar and Taimur Jhagra warned that the country was heading into political chaos, with voting rights, judicial independence and democratic norms compromised beyond recognition.
Khokhar lamented that the recent by-elections had dealt a fatal blow to public confidence in the electoral system. “Whatever happened in the by-elections has robbed the Pakistani people of their right to vote.”
The opposition leader further accused the government of dismantling constitutional guarantees and managing the state in a way that even the IMF “has exposed in the middle of the market”.
“In a country where corruption ranges from Rs5 trillion to Rs6 trillion, what else can you expect?”
Khokhar pointed to events in Azad Jammu and Kashmir as a harbinger of wider instability.
“In Azad Kashmir, people were herded like sheep and goats into another party. There is no opposition left there and when that happens, the public takes the system into their own hands,” he said, warning: “Do not push Pakistan to a similar point”.
Khokhar said jailed PTI leader Imran Khan was “a political reality” and “the most popular leader in the country right now,” and argued that the legitimacy of the system could not be restored by ignoring him.
“The value of law books has been reduced to nothing. There is an environment of complete insecurity in the country,” he lamented, calling on those in power to “lead the nation towards peace”.
Speaking on the occasion, Taimur Jhagra cited international investigation to highlight the situation. “Just yesterday the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concern in his report,” he said, adding that the report showed “astonishment at the lack of judicial independence”.
Lamenting the sorry state of the judiciary, Jhagra said, “We say every day that the courts are not doing their job properly”.
He also hit out at the treatment of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s leadership. “Our chief minister was called a terrorist and a drug dealer,” he lamented. “You can censor the media, but you can’t censor people’s minds.”
Jhagra specifically pointed to NA-18, the largest constituency in KP, and presented voting statistics to question the transparency of the poll.
“The course has 602 polling stations.Shehrnaz Omar Ayub Khan [wife of Omar Ayub Khan] got 149,782 votes while Babar Nawaz secured 124,686. Two out of three constituencies were won by Shernaz Omar Ayub,” he said.
However, he lamented that “Form-45, Form-46 and Form-47 have neither been released nor uploaded on the ECP website”.
“We want an election where the vote cast in the box is the vote that comes out.” He said the Election Commission of Pakistan had “released only one sheet, Form-47,” adding that “Form-47 has become the worst insult in our political vocabulary”.
He questioned the rationale behind spending billions on an election that “nobody trusts” and lamented that PTI could not even campaign in Lahore while “PML-N and Captain Safdar ran campaigns as they wanted”.
