PPP not to become party to any agitation to destablise system: Zardari
08 May, 2014
ISLAMABAD: Co-Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party former President Asif Ali Zardari has categorically said 'no' to any imitational politics that may be seen as leading to destabilizing the democratic structure.
"The Party has very serious reservations about the May 2013 general elections and believes that invisible hands were at play to ensure pre-determined results, but it will not join any agitation or movement to upset the democratic structure", he said while addressing a public meeting in lower Dir in Khyber Pakhtunkhwah today through a message that was read out on his behalf by his spokesperson Senator Farhatulalh Babar.
The event had been organized by the provincial chapter of the Party to mark the first martyrdom anniversary of party activists who were killed in a militants' attack during an electioneering campaign last year. The former President said that the militants' attacks last year on political rallies ahead of the elections were aimed at derailing the campaign of the PPP and to force its voters stay indoors. This was part of a larger sinister plan by invisible elements to engineer the poll results according to their own scheme, he said.
Despite obvious rigging and manipulation the Party will not come on the roads to protest against rigged elections he said.
Zardari reminded that in the past also elections were manipulated against the PPP and democratic forces. In at least one such case of gerrymandering the involvement of invisible hands by doling out to anti PPP elements monies stolen from a bank has been recently established. However, the PPP has refrained from imitational politics because it does not want to derail the democratic process for which it has rendered huge sacrifices.
He said that the PPP was the only political party whose two successive chairpersons laid down their lives for the sake of democracy and the people.
It is the only Party whose workers and leaders alike have made sacrifices for the cause of democracy and it will not allow the derailment of democratic process. The PPP may feel wounded and aggrieved because of deliberate and dishonest tilting of the playing field against it in the past but it is not suffering from a defeatist mind because it believes that it cannot be defeated, he said.
The former President also on the occasion directed the PPP provincial president Khanzada Khan to urgently complete the organizational matters of the Party and hold more of similar events to galvanize and motivate the workers throughout the province.
It may be recalled that in this constituency in lower Dir terrorists had attacked party candidate Zamin Khan's campaign in 2013 elections resulting in the martyrdom also of the candidate's brother Zahir Shah and the event had been organized to mark the anniversary of the martyrs of democracy.
The public meeting attended by a large number of workers from Malakand and Dir was also addressed by PPP provincial president Khanzada Khan, Senator Ahmed Hassan and a number of former federal and provincial ministers and members of Parliament including former federal minister Najmuddin Khan, former Provincial ministers Engineer Humayun Khan, Liaquat Shabab, Zahir Shah, Muhammad Anwar Khan and MPA from Chitral Salim Khan, besides others.
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