LAHORE, July 14: While the general elections are less than three months away, the ARD has yet to take any decision on whether or not to take part in them.
“We will cross the bridge when it comes. So far we have not reached the bridge”, ARD President Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan said while answering a question at a news conference after an emergency meeting of the alliance here on Sunday.
The ARD chief said that the alliance had decided to hold a series of public meetings in various important cities to mobilize public opinion before taking any decision on the elections.
“We have very short time at our disposal”, the octogenarian leader said in the presence of the other coalition leaders.
The ARD would hold a public meeting at Rawalpindi on July 18 which would be followed by one at Peshawar on July 22 and at Karachi on July 26.
Then the ARD leaders would meet in Karachi on July 27 to take stock of the latest situation and decide the coalition’s future course of action.
PPP Senior Vice-Chairman Makhdoom Amin Faheem, provincial information secretary Naveed Chaudhry and Abdul Qadir Shaheen, PML-N leaders Syed Zafar Ali Shah and Tehmina Daultana, PDP’s Nawaz Gondal and Istaqlal Party’s Syed Manzoor Husain Gilani were prominent among the participants. The meeting was held at the residence of PPP leader Malik Javed Shahbaz Heera.
A number of ARD leaders don’t believe that the government will hold the general elections on the set date.
The Nawabzada, however, alleged that a number of steps taken by the government amounted to pre-poll rigging.
Referring to the changes in the Political parties Act made through the PPO, the ARD leader said that they had been made to keep leaders of some important ARD parties out of the electoral arena.
About the package of constitutional amendments, he said they had made a mockery of the parliamentary system, with no parallel in any democratic country. With these amendments, he asserted, the 1973 Constitution had ceased to exist and the federal parliamentary system had come to an end.
The Nawabzada said the president had grabbed all powers and the army had been given a dominant and permanent role in governance after which assertion that future military interventions had been forestalled had become meaningless. A general, he said, had no right to take a decision on the elections of a party.
About the possibility of the ARD holding talks with Gen Musharraf at the latter’s invitation, the Nawabzada said meaningful and purposeful talks could be held only in a conducive atmosphere which was non-existent at present. He said the ARD’s demands —- none of which was against the spirit of the Constitution —- should be met before the talks. The ARD leader criticized the government for disallowing the alliance to hold public meetings at various places while the pro-government parties had been given a free hand.