KARACHI, March 29: The Pakistan People’s Party has appealed to the chief election commissioner to disqualify the MPAs who had defected their party, and declare their seats vacant.

Referring to the fresh defection from PPP of a woman member of the Sindh Assembly, the party’s information secretary, Taj Haider, termed it ‘blatant horse-trading’ and said: “if the new CEC failed to punish defectors, and stop the horse-trading and trampling of the constitution by the Establishment, the already very low credibility of his high office would suffer a further plunge and his promise of holding free and fair general elections in 2007 will fall flat.”

In a statement issued on Wednesday, he said that notwithstanding the open violation of the 14th amendment, which applied to every case of party defection, the CEC should take into cognizance the fact that before this woman MPA, another woman MPA from Sindh and at least one woman MPA from Punjab had defected the PPP-P. They had been nominated by the PPP-P to the reserved seats accruing to the PPP on the strength of the number of MPAs elected on its ticket in the general elections, he recalled.—PPI