Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar. PHOTO: FILE
ISLAMABAD:
The Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz Aaeen-e-Pakistan (TTAP) on Saturday slammed the government and state institutions, alleging that the country’s constitutional order, electoral system and judicial authority have lost their meaning.
Addressing a press conference, Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar and Taimur Jhagra warned that the country was descending into political chaos, where the right to vote, judicial independence and democratic norms had been compromised beyond recognition.
Khokhar lamented that the recent by-elections had dealt a fatal blow to public confidence in the electoral system. “Whatever happened in the by-elections, the people of Pakistan lost their right to vote.”
The opposition leader further accused the government of dismantling constitutional guarantees and managing the state in a way that even the IMF “denounced in the middle of the market.”
“In a country where corruption ranges between Rs5,000-6,000 billion, what else can one expect? »
Khokhar highlighted the events in Azad Jammu and Kashmir as a harbinger of wider instability.
“In Azad Kashmir, people have been herded like sheep and goats to another party. There is no opposition there anymore, and when that happens, the public takes over the system,” he said, warning: “Don’t push Pakistan to a similar point.”
Khokhar said incarcerated PTI leader Imran Khan was “a political reality” and “the most popular leader in the country today”, saying the legitimacy of the system could not be restored by ignoring him.
“The value of law books has been reduced to nothing. There is an environment of total uncertainty in the country,” he lamented, calling on leaders to “lead the nation towards peace.”
Speaking on the occasion, Taimur Jhagra cited international attention to highlight the situation. “Just yesterday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed his concern in his report,” he said, adding that the report showed “his astonishment at the lack of judicial independence.”
Jhagra lamented the deplorable state of the judiciary, saying, “We say every day that the courts are not doing their job properly.”
He also criticized the treatment of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa leaders. “Our prime minister has been called a terrorist and a drug trafficker,” he lamented. “You can censor the media, but you can’t censor people’s minds.”
Specifically citing NA-18, the largest constituency in KP, Jhagra presented voting statistics to question the transparency of the bypoll.
“The constituency has 602 polling stations. Shehrnaz Omar Ayub Khan [wife of Omar Ayub Khan] received 149,782 votes while Babar Nawaz got 124,686. Two out of three polling stations were won by Shernaz Omar Ayub,” he said.
However, he lamented that “Forms 45, 46 and 47 have neither been published nor uploaded on the ECP website.”
“We want an election where the vote put in the box is the vote that comes out.” He said the Election Commission of Pakistan had “issued only one sheet, Form 47”, adding that “Form 47 has become the worst insult in our political vocabulary”.
He questioned the rationale for spending billions on an election that “no one trusts” and lamented that the PTI could not even campaign in Lahore, while “the PML-N and Captain Safdar were running campaigns as they pleased.”
