Call for fresh polls echoes in Senate

Endorsing the Jamaat-e-Islami’s (JI) demand that fresh mandate should be sought from the people and new elections be held in the country, the PML-N said the government had compounded the crises in the country instead of resolving them.
“The government has become an existential threat to the country. It has lost credibility, integrity and legitimacy because it has failed to resolve the crises for which the people of the country had given it their mandate. Now the situation demands that fresh mandate be sought and new elections be held in the country,” JI Senator Professor Khurshid Ahmed said while taking part in the debate on the address of the president to the joint session of parliament.
Meanwhile, Ishaq Dar endorsing JI’s demand said the government had compounded the crises instead of resolving them. The JI senator said Pakistan was facing the challenges of energy shortage, poverty and inflation, lawlessness, corruption, foreign policy crisis and bad governance but the president in his address did not give any roadmap to address the issues. “The address of the president is always an analysis of the past and in the light of that analysis a roadmap is given for the future but the last address of the president was completely devoid of content and thought in terms of that roadmap,” Ahmed said, adding that power generation capacity in the country was 18,000MW but only 10,000MW was being produced.
He said gas and electricity load shedding and unemployment has increased during the last three years and not a single step had been taken to address those issues. “Corruption has reached its zenith and now ministers on the intervention of the court are retuning the kickbacks but no action is being taken against these corrupt ministers. The bad governance during the period of this is exemplary. Around 20.5 million people have further come down the poverty line during the last three years. Cronies and corrupt people are being promoted and elevated.
The president has spent Rs 400 million and the prime minister Rs 1.2 billion on foreign visits,” he said. He alleged that the president had been behaving in manner which had brought his office into disrepute. The JI leader alleged that the language used by the president in his speeches against other leaders was undignified. Dar said that the government had compounded the crises in the last three years. “I fully endorse what Professor Khurshid has said. The government’s wrong polices have compounded the crisis,” Dar said.
He also alleged that the government was seeking that the accountability law should be toothless whereas the PML-N wanted a proper mechanism to hold the corrupt accountable. He said the government had broken its pledges to cut down its expenses.