Pakistan: PPP wants probe into PTI accusations of tampering with election results

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Punjab President Mian Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo, who is currently on a visit to the United States, has demanded judicial probe into fresh allegations levelled by PTI Chief Imran Khan on Tuesday of tampering with results of various constituencies by a team at the Information Technology University.

According to a statement issued by the PPP provincial secretariat here on Wednesday, Wattoo expressed these views while talking to party leaders and workers in New York. PPP Lahore leader Misbahur Rehamn was also present there.

Wattoo said that the government should have readily accepted demands of the PTI regarding thumbprints verification in four constituencies of Lahore, adding their foot dragging had created much political tension in the country when it was fighting the war of its survival.

The PPP Punjab president expressed his disapproval over delaying tactics of the PML-N government regarding thumbprints verification on one pretext or the other, thus giving credence to the impression that they had some skeletons in their cupboards, which they were hiding.

He also supported PPP Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari’s statement as compatible to the aspirations of people in which the former president had demanded Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to conduct himself like an elected prime minister and not like a monarch, who acted on his whims without any regard to the problems of the people.

Wattoo regretted that the mandarins had learnt no lesson from the history and that their personal style of governance confined within the family clan was grossly incongruous to the democratic ethos because collective wisdom was its essence.

Describing the PML-N government’s rule as anti-people, he added that the PPP, being the party of the poor, could not afford to align itself with those, who were pursuing policies against the masses. He said that electricity outages cobbled with skyrocketing inflation, worsening law and order, poverty and lack of health and education facilities had made the lives of the people miserable.

In particular, he said, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif was showcasing his performance through aggressive advertisements campaigns on taxpayers’ money but the ground realities were quite opposite. Shahbaz Sharif’s personal and unsubstantiated self-projection was being taken as insult to their injury, he opined.

The former Punjab chief minister reiterated that for the PPP, democracy was non- negotiable because it stood for the people’s politics and said that any entity that distanced itself from serving the people, would not find the PPP as its supporter and would lose its sympathy eventually.