Lahore: Jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s party called Saturday’s election of the President of Pakistan “unconstitutional and unacceptable” and
Lahore: Jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s party called Saturday’s election of the President of Pakistan “unconstitutional and unacceptable” and urged the people to hold peaceful protests across the country against poll robbery on Sunday.
Asif Ali Zardari was elected as the 14th president of Pakistan massively beating his rival Mahmood Khan Achakzai, the head of Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) and fielded by Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), which in turn is backed by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Khan has already claimed the February 8 polls to have witnessed the ‘Mother of All Rigging’ and called his rivals the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) as “mandate thieves”.
On Saturday, when Zardari, the PPP co-chairman and a consensus candidate of PPP and PML-N, won the presidential election hands down, almost a week after PML-N candidate Shehbaz Sharif won the prime ministerial post, Khan came down heavily on the duo, saying the nation will not accept the “most corrupt persons” — Shehbaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari — as prime minister and president, respectively.
“On the one hand, the newly elected President Zardari will ride to the highest constitutional position on coattails of the votes of mandate thieves and, on the other, the electoral colleges were incomplete,” PTI spokesperson Raoof Hasan said in a statement.
