Imran Khan’s party PTI will sit in opposition in Pakistan Parliament

Islamabad:

With its efforts to form the next government failing despite winning maximum seats, embattled Imran Khan’s party on Friday decided to sit in opposition at the Center as per the instructions of the jailed party founder and former prime minister.

The decision was announced by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s Barrister Ali Saif, a day after the party named Omar Ayub Khan as its prime ministerial candidate and Aslam Iqbal as chief minister for Punjab.

Speaking to the media after visiting Qaumi Watan Party in Islamabad, Saif said that the party has decided to sit in the opposition at the Center and Punjab under the instructions of party founder Khan.

“We decided to sit in the opposition despite the fact that if we had got seats as per our votes and the results had not changed, we would probably have been at the Center today with 180 seats. We have evidence that our candidate won,” he said. Said.

It was not clear whether the party would participate in the elections for the Prime Minister and Chief Minister of Punjab after the decision to join the opposition camp.

Earlier in the day, PTI claimed that at least 85 seats won by it in Parliament were snatched away in the “biggest voter fraud” in the country’s history and called for “peaceful” nationwide protests on Saturday against the alleged rigging. Plan announced.

In the February 8 election, a majority of independent candidates supported by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf won 93 of the 265 National Assembly seats.

However, PTI’s two main rivals are on their way to forming a coalition government after former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) formed a post-poll alliance on Tuesday. Are on.

PML-N won 75 seats while PPP stood third with 54 seats. Muttahida Qaumi Movement Pakistan (MQM-P) has also agreed to support him with its 17 seats.

To form the government, a party must win 133 of the 265 seats contested in the 266-member National Assembly.

PTI Information Secretary Rauf Hasan and other leaders including Sher Afzal Marwat, Rehana Dar, Shoaib Shaheen and Salman Akram Raja, who challenged its election results at various forums, addressed a press conference here.

Hasan said that 2024 will be remembered because of the “biggest voter fraud” in the history of Pakistan against the party and its candidates.

“According to our estimate, out of 177 [National Assembly] Out of the seats which should have been ours, only 92 seats have been given to us. And 85 seats were taken away from us by fraud.

He said that the party is taking constitutional and legal steps to combat rigging and reclaim its rights.

“We have verified the data about 46 seats and it is being compiled for 39 seats,” he said.

Hasan also highlighted discrepancies between Form 45 and Form 47, which relate to the count of each polling station and the overall count of all polling stations in a constituency, respectively.

Hasan claimed that there was a huge difference in the number of votes cast for the National Assembly and provincial assembly seats. He said that in some cases the number of rejected votes exceeded the margin of victory.

PTI leader Shandana Gulzar said the party got 12.5 lakh votes from Karachi but it was strange that it could not win even a single seat.

Party leader and senior lawyer Salman Akram Raja claimed that rigging took place when the results were being transferred from the polling booth to the offices of the returning officers.

“The results which should have been declared on the basis of Form 45 were completely changed. They rigged the elections as much as possible on the night of February 8,” he said.

Separately, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) spokesperson Maryam Aurangzeb told a press conference in Lahore that TV channels started showing partial counting results after counting was completed at other polling stations. That started to change as more results were announced.

“Form 45 was already released to the media and social media when the results were being compiled,” he said.

He said PTI is questioning the results in Punjab where it lost but it is not talking about the results in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa because it won the province.

“It is part of PTI’s culture to reject elections if they lose,” he said.

Meanwhile, PTI has already announced to hold protests across the country on Saturday and is also trying to get the support of other parties.

PTI has called for nationwide protests tomorrow (Saturday) against the “unprecedented, massive” [and] Shameless rigging in elections”.

In a post on Twitter, PTI claimed that its “win of 180 National Assembly seats and two-thirds majority in Parliament was halved”.

In a related development, the Supreme Court of Pakistan will on Monday hear a petition seeking to declare the recently held general elections void amid allegations of election rigging and deliberate delay in declaration of results by several parties.

The petition, which will be heard by a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, sought the apex court to declare the results of the February 8 elections invalid and hold re-polls under supervision within 30 days Is. Judiciary monitoring, The Express Tribune newspaper reported.

According to reports, the petitioner, a private citizen, has also named the Election Commission of Pakistan and the federal government as respondents in the case.

Meanwhile, according to a media report, the meeting scheduled for Friday between the PML-N and PPP coordination committees to finalize government formation at the Center has been postponed.

The meeting was reportedly postponed as the PML-N’s committee has not yet consulted with the party’s senior leadership on the matter, Geo News reported.

It said the second round of talks between the two parties will be held on Saturday to decide the power-sharing formula for forming the coalition government.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)