KARACHI: Pakistan Peoples Party’s city president Saeed Ghani on Sunday said certain forces were creating the conditions aiming at “restraining us from smoothly running our election campaign”.

“(Our) banners and flags are being removed from houses of our supporters and workers, which is huge injustice to the PPP to run its campaign unhindered,” said Mr Ghani while addressing a press conference at the party’s media cell.

He said no party was satisfied and had objections over the code of conduct of the Election Commission of Pakistan, which was denying rights to the parties to ‘sell their programme’ to voters across the country.

He said the situation was made so much hard that the parties had to get permissions to visit a city or any shrine etc.
“We’ll deem that the coming elections would not be transparent if such tactics are not stopped forthwith.”

He claimed certain forces were trying to ensure ‘deliberately’ that the turnout in the coming vote should remain low.

“Certain powers are trying to strengthen the call of boycotting [the polls] given by Altaf Hussain,” he said, adding, “Altaf Hussain will celebrate if these tactics succeed in keeping the turnout low”.

He said removing party flags and banners were traditional tools to pace up momentum of elections and that would, by no means, affect the election results.

“The ECP and the local administration should understand this and stop employing such restrictions.”

He said the ECP should not get involved in deeds that affect the election process adversely.

He also said the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency was the brother of a candidate of the Grand Democratic Alliance and PPP had already written a letter to the ECP to remove him from the post to ensure the FIA should not influence upon the elections.

Mr Ghani also blamed the authorities of appointing the relatives of the candidates of the opposition parties, which, he added, were seemed political acts.

However, he maintained, the PPP would win the elections again in Sindh “let they do whatever they please”.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2018