The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf on Wednesday said it had made the decision to file a reference against Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja in the Supreme Judicial Council.
The announcement was made by ex-information minister Fawad Chaudhry, who said that Pakistan’s “biggest political party had lost trust in in the CEC”. He called on the CEC to take the respectable option and resign.
Chaudhry was speaking to media outside the Election Commission of Pakistan’s building alongside PTI leader Faisal Vawda. He said the “biggest reason behind the political crisis that Pakistan is facing today is the election commission being non-functional as an institution”.
He said it was institutions’ job to “maintain a balance in the country … and they fail to do so because appointments in them are not based on merit”.
Chaudhry said party chief Imran Khan had implied that CEC had been biased against the PTI and favored the ruling party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz. He went on to say that the ECP was incomplete as it did not have members from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and as a result, was not representing around 70 percent population of Pakistan.
Chaudhry continued that the only way forward for his party was to carry on its political struggle alongside starting a “legal struggle”.
Therefore, he said, PTI planned to file a reference against the CEC in the Supreme Judicial Council. “Because no CEC would run his office the way [this] CEC ran his office,” he added.
