October 10, 2007	Wednesday	Ramazan 27, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Oct 9: The People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) on Tuesday demanded of the government to suspend local government institutions and freeze their funds three months prior to the forthcoming general elections to ensure fairness and transparency of the process.

PPP Election Monitoring Cell chief Senator Latif Khosa said if the government wanted to delimit the constituencies then this should be done as early as possible to enable the candidates and the parties to rectify their objections well in time.

Talking to Dawn after a meeting of the Cell, he said the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) should also notify the election staff and polling stations before time to avoid last minute changes, which were normally made to manipulate the polls.

Mr Khosa said due to the efforts of the PPP, the ECP had rectified the faulty voters’ list and three million voters had been included in it and now the total number of voters had reached eighty million.

However, he said, the party had asked the ECP to post the voters’ list to its website so that the parties could verify its authenticity.

He clarified that the party had no confidence at all in the ECP due to its partial attitude during the recent presidential election. Moreover, he said, the ECP had rectified the voters’ list only after the intervention of the Supreme Court.

Mr Khosa said he was unable to understand the criticism being carried out against the PPP after promulgation of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). He claimed the NRO was a culmination of some of the demands of the Charter of Democracy (CoD) singed by ARD parties, last year in London.

He said the PPP had not violated the CoD and it was committed to its implementation. He said following the CoD, the PPP did not vote for the president in uniform.

The meeting of the Election Monitoring Cell was attended by MPA Amir Fida Piracha, deputy information secretary of PPP Punjab Syed Kashif Rizvi, secretary PPP Foreign Liaison Committee Palwasha Behram and Nazir Dhoki.