KARACHI, Aug 24: An all-parties conference of religious and political parties has rejected the local government elections, describing them as ‘total fraud’ and stressing the need for holding an APC at national level to consider the matter.

The agenda of the proposed APC should be a one-point programme – launching of a peaceful countrywide movement with the aim of forcing the government to declare the LB elections null and void — with demand that an independent chief election commissioner be appointed and fresh LB elections be held.

This was stated in a joint communiqué adopted at the APC held on Wednesday under the auspices of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Karachi. Senator Prof Ghafoor Ahmad chaired the conference participated by more than a dozen major and smaller parties.

The participants called for issuance of a joint white paper on the ‘rigged elections’.

The communiqué demanded armed forces’ return to the barracks and confining their job to their constitutional duty of defending the country’s borders. It called for setting up of a caretaker government for holding general elections.

Speaking at the conference, Prof Ghafoor Ahmad said that all opposition parties had been expressing their apprehensions about rigging which proved true, but the involvement of the Election Commission in the rigging had not been unexpected, and had no parallel in the history of the country.

“We have sent documentary proof of rigging to the EC, he claimed, and remarked: “But people have been defeated and deprived of their right to franchise.”

Senator Raza Rabbani of PPP alleged that the government had rigged polls not only in Karachi but in the entire country. He said that already stuffed ballet boxes had been placed in polling stations and the Election Commission had failed to discharge its constitutional obligations in this regard. He described attacks on opposition leaders, kidnappings and killings as fascism resorted to by the ruling coalition.

PML-N leader Mamnoon Hussain stressed that without getting rid of military rule, the country could not see a political change because in the past, military rulers had never allowed holding of free, fair and transparent elections.

He said that all past general elections held in the country were also rigged and unless the role of army from politics was not eliminated, nobody should even think of having free and fair general elections in the country.

ARD leader Zain Ansari was of the view that people’s problems could not be solved until all democratic forces forged unity.

Allama Hasan Turabi (Tehrik-i-Islami), Maulana Abdul Karim Abid (JUI-F), Mohammad Akram Qadri (Sunni Tehrik), Syed Zia Abbas (NPP), Ghulam Sarwar Awan (PPI), Qari Sher Afzal (JUI), Zubair Khan (PTI), Basharat Mirza (PDP) and Mufti Usmanyar Khan (JUI-S) were among others who spoke at the conference.