Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto has said that lawmakers belonging to the allies of the government were coerced into attending the joint session of the parliament today which saw the bill on electronic voting machines passed.
Fielding questions outside the National Assembly after the joint session of parliament on Wednesday, Bhutto said that he received reports that the government’s allies were telephoned and in some cases the police were also sent to their homes to bring them to the joint session with force.
The opposition leader said that despite trying with all their might, if the government had failed to bring all their numbers to the floor, it was a glaring failure on their part in his eyes.
Bhutto further said that the opposition was never disunited inside parliament and would defeat the government from within, even if there were controversies reported on the outside.
Pointing towards the National Assembly behind him, he said that parliament was the only space that could decide for the future of the country and that is what the opposition was striving for.
A day ago on Tuesday, Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) head and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman said that PTI was coercing its allies, Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) and Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P), to show up at the joint session.
Addressing a press conference in Quetta, Rehman said that the government was forcefully trying to gather support for its bills, which covered the issues of electoral reforms, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and others.
Rehman had previously also spoken with Bhutto, even though the PPP leader had previously stepped back from PDM, of which he was a founding member initially. Rehman said that the two opposition leaders had decided to present a united front to defeat PTI in the parliament.
The opposition staged a walk-out protest in the joint session of parliament on Wednesday, after the government managed to get approval for the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and secured the right for overseas Pakistanis to vote.
