Jailed former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan’s party accused the election commission of “dilly-dallying tactics” in granting it permission to retain the cricket bat as its election symbol, describing the poll body’s move as pre-poll rigging. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) also has called for immediate action from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to avoid further complications, stressing that it had already submitted all the required documents to the poll body after holding intra-party polls.
The PTI held its election on December 2 following a ruling by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for fresh intra-party polls to elect its chairman and other key officer-bearers to retain the cricket bat as its election symbol. The same day, the party announced that it had elected 71-year-old Imran Khan’s nominee, Barrister Gohar Khan, as the party Chairman.
The ECP on Friday issued a notice to the party on a petition challenging its recent organisational polls, which were termed as “rigged and fraudulent”. In a statement on Saturday, a PTI spokesperson alleged that the PTI was the target of the worst state repression and ongoing political engineering before the elections, the Dawn newspaper reported.
The spokesperson added that all the evidence and signs were enough to expose the state’s ambitions to commit historical electoral fraud in the coming general election, the report said. After completing its intra-party elections on December 2 and submitting all necessary documents to the ECP, the party expressed dismay at the ECP’s “dilly-dallying tactics”.
“Since general elections are around the corner, this delay by the ECP was a severe form of pre-poll rigging,” the spokesperson said. He argued that withholding the ‘bat’ symbol is tantamount to undermining the country’s Constitution, democracy, transparent elections and political identity from millions of Pakistanis. The spokesperson asserted that these actions reflected a desperate attempt by anti-democratic forces to exclude the party from politics.
The official also condemned the ECP’s decision in November to invalidate PTI’s intra-party elections and the demand for a re-election within 20 days. He insisted that it was unprecedented in the country’s history that Imran Khan, PTI’s founder, voluntarily stepped down from the position for the sake of democracy and the rule of law.
The spokesperson said that instead of handing over the chairmanship of the party to someone from his family, Imran Khan nominated a capable and loyal party worker as a candidate for the post of chairman in the intra-party elections. He went on to say that “the country’s most popular political party”, which he claimed enjoyed the support of over three-fourths of the eligible voting population, was being subjected to a conspiracy and a “technical knockout”.
