'PTI conspiring to put off polls,' says Shehbaz Sharif as ECP halts ROs training

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz President Shehbaz Sharif. — PID/File

The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) accused rival party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of trying to defer the general elections after the national polls governing body on Thursday halted the training of the district returning officers (DROs) and returning officers (ROs).

Shehbaz Sharif, PML-N President and former prime minister, said that the PTI was hatching a conspiracy to put off the polls, slated for February 8, 2024, as the Lahore High Court (LHC) ruled in favour of Imran Khan's party on a plea against hiring DROs and ROs from the bureaucracy.

The PML-N president, in a statement, said the plea amounted to sabotaging people’s representation.

“The PTI’s petition in the high court is a plot to run away from the elections. PTI is hatching a conspiracy against the February 8 general elections just like cipher. As always, the PTI is applying double-standard and hypocritical policy here,” he said.

The former prime minister further said the PTI was filing petitions in the courts to postpone the polls, while publicly demanding to hold elections on time.

“Even in the 2018 elections, the bureaucracy had carried out the responsibility of DROs. Then the PTI did not object to bureaucratic DROs performing their duty,” he said, adding that if the elections of February 8, 2024, were delayed, the PTI would be responsible.

Shehbaz said the PTI had adopted different stances on the cipher controversy in public and during the investigation. "[...] now the PTI has adopted the same hypocrisy elections." He blamed the PTI for plotting “a similar conspiracy related to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme”.

He said the PTI wanted political instability by creating a constitutional crisis in the country. The PTI did not want the country to be economically strong and people's economic problems to end, he maintained.

Meanwhile, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Faisal Karim Kundi, without naming anyone, said if a political party claimed to be so large then why it is calling for delaying elections?

He also lashed out at the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) saying it was always used for political engineering. He said the same NAB had been lodging cases against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and now it was acquitting him in cases one after another.

“The masses should be told either the NAB was wrong in the past or is wrong today. It is not somebody’s personal property, but an institution,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) stopped training DROs and ROs who were appointed for the upcoming general elections following the LHC order.

A spokesperson for the ECP announced through a notification that the commission had directed to stop the training of DROs and ROs on the LHC order.

The notification has been sent to the election commissioners of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It said that training of DROs and ROs was underway in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and Quetta.

Earlier, the high court suspended the ECP order seeking ROs from bureaucracy for the general elections on February 8 next year.

Announcing his reserved verdict on a petition filed by the PTI, Justice Ali Baqir Najafi referred the case to the LHC chief justice, recommending constituting a larger bench to hear the case.

Petitioner Umair Niazi contended before the one-judge LHC bench that the Election Commission has contacted the government for returning officers, adding that impartial and transparent elections could not be expected from a caretaker government. He requested the court to annul the ECP’s notification.