‘Judiciary won’t influence outcome of polls’
london — Pressure from Pakistan’s judiciary won’t influence the outcome of upcoming general elections this year, Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal has said, adding he hoped the election would be free and fair.
Earlier this month, Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif of the ruling Pakistan Muslim LeagueNawaz (PML-N) party from holding office for life amid an ongoing corruption trial.
Sharif and his family have called the corruption proceedings a conspiracy and hinted at intervention by the military, but opponents have hailed them as a rare example of the rich and powerful being held accountable. The military denies any such intervention.
“We hope elections will be fair and free as the country can’t afford any crisis as a result, but recently there are some concerns due to the judicial activism and how the national accountability bureau has been pursuing cases against only one party,” the minister told Reuters, speaking at Pakistan’s High Commission in London.
He also highlighted complaints by media groups that they had not been allowed to broadcast.
But he did not think such activities would affect the election’s outcome: “In the past we have seen attempts to influence the process but when millions of people vote it is very difficult to control the outcome.”
The minister said the election would most likely be held in the last week of July and he expected the PML-N to win on the back of its economic record. It gained control of the parliament’s upper house in a secret ballot in early March.
He expects a GDP growth rate of 6.2 per cent in 2019 and 6.4 per cent in 2020, up from 5.8 per cent in 2018 according to provisional estimates from Pakistan’s Bureau of Statistics. But a surge in imports, in part driven by purchases of machinery for the Chinese Belt and Road projects, has widened Pakistan’s current account deficit and prompted analysts to suggest the country may need an International Monetary Fund bailout in the next 12 months. —