PESHAWAR, May 15: Pakistan People’s Party has rejected the election results by describing the electoral exercise totally rigged and manipulated, and decided to begin demonstrations against it across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

It also decided to move the election tribunal against the election results.

According to insiders, most of PPP leaders felt extremely disappointed over defeat in the May 11 elections but the party workers at grassroots level are satisfied because they had always raised voice against poor performance of party ministers and lawmakers during the last five years.

“Democracy is the best revenge. These are the words of our leader Benazir Bhutto and that they were repeated by our young leader, Bilawal Bhutto, at a public meeting. Now, these words are materialised by PPP workers in the elections,” PPP provincial vice president Azam Afridi told Dawn.

He said the election was a result of the harsh behaviour of former PPP ministers, MPAs and MNAs, who never paid attention to workers, who used their democratic right and took the revenge from the candidates.

Mr Afridi said nobody should shy away from accepting responsibility of failure as all PPP lawmakers, especially ministers, had neglected workers and therefore, the election results were not unexpected.

However, another leader said with resignation of PPP provincial president Anwar Saifullah Khan, some key leaders had begun efforts to win support of senior activists and former members of national and provincial assemblies to grab the slot.

Former provincial president Syed Zahir Ali Shah is reportedly among them.

Admitting failure to show good performance in the elections, Mr Saifullah had tendered resignation to the leadership lately. However, the resignation has yet to be accepted and that is why he has convened a party meeting at his house on Friday to discuss issues post elections.

An insider said PPP faced internal differences to the extent that another meeting was held on Wednesday on Golf Club Shami Road, where majority of the senior leaders and office bearers had showed up to decide future line of action.

Noted among them were Abdul Akbar Khan, Najmuddin Khan, Nighat Orakzai, Syed Zahir Ali Shah, Syed Ayub Shah, Liaquat Shabab, Gohar Inqilabi, Hamayun Khan, Ijaz Yousufzai and Malik Amjad, who stressed the need to hold intra-party elections like Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf with proper membership.

They also said activities and polices of the new governments would be closely monitored to exploit them if Benazir Income Support Programme and Waseela-i-Haq programmes were stopped. The participants said the activities of PML-N and PTI would be checked in light of their election slogans regarding energy crisis, unemployment and inflation.

Following the meeting, PPP provincial spokesman Liaquat Shabab told Dawn that no other issue had been discussed in the meeting except the results of the recent elections.

He said his party didn’t accept the election results and would contact other parties to launch movement against the results. “We will contact the Election Commission of Pakistan to show our concern and force it to conduct re-elections on all seats of national and provincial assemblies in the province,” he said.

Mr Liaquat avoided responding to a query about the next provincial president in case resignation of Anwar Saifullah Khan is accepted and only said Mr Saifullah was still the party’s provincial president.