Asad Umar asks president to exercise constitutional powers to announce election dates

The governors of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab are violating the Constitution by not announcing the dates of the elections for the assemblies of their respective provinces.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Central General Secretary Asad Umar said this while addressing a press conference on Thursday at the PTI Sindh Secretariat in Karachi. He was accompanied by Sindh PTI President Syed Ali Haider Zaidi, Vice President Bilal Ghaffar, Karachi PTI President Aftab Siddiqui and others.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) was also not fulfilling its constitutional duties, Umar said as he mentioned that even the Supreme Court judges in their recent remarks had stated that the elections must be held within 90 days after the dissolution of the assemblies.

The PTI leader stated that Pakistan was in the midst of a constitutional crisis due to the actions of the ‘imported government’. The government and its allies were running away from the elections due to their fear of facing Imran Khan and the public, he added.

He lamented that the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) was prepared to violate the Constitution to avoid the elections, whereas, the PTI was trying to force the elections working within the ambit of the Constitution and law.

Umar referred to the Article 57(1) of the Elections Act 2017, which gave powers to the president to give an election date. In his concluding remarks, he appealed to President Arif Alvi to exercise his constitutional powers to resolve the current crisis.

Zaidi continued the press conference by congratulating Aftab Siddiqui on his appointment by the PTI chairman as the Karachi PTI president and elevation of Bilal Ghaffar as the Sindh PTI vice president.

He described the recent mini-budget and economic policies of Federal Finance Minister Ishaq Dar as ‘voodoo economics’. He compared the prices of several essential commodities at the time of regime change and with the current prices to illustrate the difference in performance of the PTI and PDM governments.

The Sindh PTI president lamented the reports of missing record of the JIT report related to Imran Khan’s attempted assassination by the Anti-Corruption Punjab. He alleged that records of other high-profile cases had also gone missing.

Commenting on the denial of bail to Imran by courts, he said people like a PPP MNA who was an alleged killer of journalist Nazim Jokhio had obtained protective bail from the Sindh High Court while he was in Dubai. He added that bail was granted to both Shehbaz Sharif and his son Hamza in money laundering cases without them being present in court.

In his concluding remarks, Zaidi supported demands mentioned in Imran’s letter to President Alvi regarding probing the alleged violations of office by former chief of army staff General (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa.

If broadcast of illegal recordings of Imran would help fix the woes of the country, the government should continue doing that, he remarked as he warned of possible riots because of inflation if free and fair elections were not held soon.