Daily Times

Quetta: Jamaat-e-Islami amir Sirajul Haq has said that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has failed to hold transparent elections and it has suppressed the voice of the masses.

He was addressing the provincial shura of the party in Balochistan here on Monday.

Haq said that the Election Commission had not been able to satisfy the political parties and added that controlled democracy was not acceptable.

He said although the Election Commission had been made autonomous but its powers were used for the July 25 election by the unseen forces.

As a result, the masses were deprived of fair and transparent elections. He said that if the electoral system was not reformed, the people would lose confidence in the ballot box. The JI chief urged the powers-that-be not to make Balochistan a laboratory for their experiments.

Haq insisted that the solution of all the problems of the country and the masses laid in the Islamic system and added that true Islamic revolution could be achieved only through the democratic process.

He stressed that the people of Balochistan should be given their due share in the CPEC which ‘was a gigantic project for development’.

Speaking on the occasion, JI Secretary General Liaqat Baloch said that the problems of Balochistan could be solved through fair elections, end of corruption and the use of the provinces resources for the province.

Different reports on the problems facing the province were presented at the meeting.

JI Balochistan amir Maulana Abdul Haq Hashmi said on the occasion that the JI was an ideological party and the goal before its workers was not victory in the elections. Instead, they wanted the pleasure of Allah and treated politics as an act of worship. He said that struggle in this direction would continue uninterrupted.

Published in Daily Times, August 7^th 2018.