US senator urges Pakistani authorities to probe into Feb 8 polls

WASHINGTON DC: AUS Senator has urged the Pakistani authorities to fully investigate the claims of vote rigging in the country's elections, emphasising that without a credible investigation, a new government will struggle to bring the Pakistani people together.

Taking to X on Friday, Senator Chris Van Hollen shared photos of a letter he wrote to Pakistan's Ambassador to the US Masood Khan on February 21 in which he praised the millions of Pakistanis who voted on February 8 in the country's elections. The significant turnout of Pakistani people from around the country and every walk of life speaks to the fundamental role elections play in democracies around the world, he said. ''Unfortunately, these elections were marred by political violence, allegations of unfair restrictions on political expression, and accusations of vote rigging," the Democrat Senator wrote.

The junior senator from Maryland, who was incidentally born in Karachi, further said, "The State Department agreed with international and local election observers' assessment that 'these elections included undue restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly'." The letter also said Pakistani authorities shut down mobile telecommunications ostensibly as a security measure and the allegations made by a senior administrative official of Punjab province that he participated in fraud "converting losers into winners" and changing the results for 13 national parliament seats.

Van Hollen urged Pakistan to "fully investigate the allegations of fraud and electoral interference". "Without a credible investigation, a new government will struggle to bring the Pakistani people together," he said.

Meanwhile, a high-level inquiry committee constituted by Pakistan's top electoral body on Friday said the explosive allegations of election rigging levelled by the former senior bureaucrat were "false and based on lies".

The report of the probe committee came a day after Rawalpindi's former Commissioner Liaquat Ali Chattha on Thursday took a U-turn and withdrew his allegations, saying he had made the rigging charges at the behest of former prime minister Imran Khan's party which offered him a "lucrative position".

Khan's Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party on Friday approached the Supreme Court challenging the outcome of the elections alleging widespread rigging.

Khan has already declared the entire process as the 'Mother of All Rigging' and has been insisting that his party's mandate was stolen because of the rigging.

The party has claimed that it won 180 seats in the National Assembly by way of independent candidates backed by the party, however, the rigging ensured that the number was reduced to 92 seats only, thus robbing its chance of coming back to power.

The petition comes two days after the top court disposed of a petition seeking to annul the elections and imposed a fine on a petitioner, a former Army officer, for failing to appear in court after filing the petition.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the party led by another former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, won 75 seats while the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) came third with 54 seats. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement Pakistan (MQM-P) has 17 seats.

Given the Constitutional provision that a party must win 133 out of 265 contested seats in the 266-member National Assembly to form a government, the PML-N and the PPP have agreed on a power-sharing deal to form a new coalition government.

Under this arrangement, PML-N's Shehbaz Sharif is projected as the prime minister candidate, while PPP's Asif Ali Zardari is to be the president, and may effectively end former Khan's chances of returning to power.