JI lambastes ECP for ‘failure to hold fair elections’

Karachi Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Emir Hafiz Naeemur Rehman on Friday asserted that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) failed in a miserable manner to hold free and fair elections and manipulated the entire results of the national and provincial assemblies constituencies in Karachi.

Addressing a press conference at the Karachi JI headquarters Idara Noor-e-Haq, he said the JI would hold protests and sit-ins against historical rigging and insult of the public mandate. He added that the JI would expand the scope of protests across the country.

He said the JI’s and independent candidates secured majority of votes in all of the national and provincial assembly constituencies of the city but the MQM was being imposed on the city by snatching the real mandate of the people of the Karachi.

The ECP would have to explain what outcome it wanted to achieve by violating the mandate of people time and again, he said. The entire exercise cost the national exchequer Rs48 billion, he said, asking what the purpose of such an expensive exercise was if the ECP had to announce the result of its own will.

Detailing the anomalies, he said the ECP had announced that the forms 45 and 46 would be issued the same night but it was not the case. He said that the forms 45 and 46 were issued on Friday and they showed the worst kind of rigging.

Highlighting several examples, including one of PS-91 where the MQM bagged 5,000 votes but in the connected NA, it was bestowed 88,000 votes.

He also highlighted that according to the forms, the JI’s candidate in NA-236 only received 21,000 votes. Similarly, he said, according to the result announced by the ECP, independent Alamgir bagged only 10,000 votes as per the announcement, whereas both the candidates received much more votes as per the forms 45 and 46.

He said the JI’s candidate Mohammad Farooq in PS-91 came first with 23,000 votes whereas Mohammad Ahmed, Junaid Mukati, and Abdul Rasheed also won in PS-124, PS-104 and PS-106 respectively. He also pointed that dozens of polling stations came under attack.