Daily Times

Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) leader and JUI-F chief Fazlur Rehman Saturday said Prime Minister Imran Khan will not get a chance to escape when they reached Islamabad.

“We will shut down the roads when we reach Islamabad,” he said while addressing a rally in Peshawar alongside other PDM leaders. Fazl did not mention when the opposition alliance would march towards Islamabad.

The rally was a part of a series of protests by the PDM, which included demonstrations in Karachi and Quetta earlier this month. The opposition alliance will now head towards Lahore and then Islamabad but the dates are yet to be announced. “We will keep fighting till the government drowns in the sea,” the PDM chief said, adding that the current setup had “damaged the country’s Islamic identity”.

He claimed that the opposition, ahead of a joint sitting of the parliament received threatening phone calls demanding that votes for the passage of bills be given in favour of the government. Fazl said the opposition alliance had not demanded local bodies elections, rather they wanted immediate general elections.

Referring to the 2018 general elections, he said the ‘stolen’ votes of the people should be returned to them, adding that the government had made arrangements to rig the next elections once more.

The opposition has been persistent that the government “formed the basis of rigging” in the next elections when it bulldozed 33 bills in Wednesday’s joint sitting, including crucial bills related to the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and granting voting rights to overseas Pakistanis. PML-N leader and former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said the incumbent government was “not the people’s representative”.

The former premier said the events that led to the rigging of the 2018 elections were gradually coming to light, as he reminded the people that former chief justice of Gilgit-Baltistan Rana Shamim had blamed ex-chief justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar for “playing a part in rigging” the polls.