KARACHI, May 16: A “successful” observance of protest in urban centres and strike in rural towns on a call of Pakistan Muslim League-Functional chief Pir Pagara against the “stolen mandate” of the people in the May 11 elections has exposed the “fake mandate” of the Pakistan Peoples Party, said PML-F Sindh chapter general secretary Imtiaz Ahmad Shaikh.

Summing up the response of the people to the Pir Pagara call at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club on Thursday, Mr Shaikh reiterated the demand that before notifying the May 11 election results the voters thumb impressions be verified by the National Database and Registration Authority.

He asked whether it was not because of vote rigging that PPP candidates got thousands of votes more than what they had bagged in the 2008 elections held in the wake of their leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Thanking the people and other political parties for making the protest day strike call “a success”, the PML-F leader said if the election commission failed to take action against those involved in manipulating the results and depriving the people of their mandate, the party would announce its next phase of protest after a meeting summoned by Pir Pagara.

He condemned the killing of three persons and wounding of dozens of others in firing on a rally in Khairpur and said the government machinery instead of arresting the culprits involved in the shooting had arrested hundreds of their supporters and party activists.

Demanding their immediate release, Mr Shaikh, who was accompanied by Pirzada Yasir Sain, Sardar Rahim, Nusrat Seher Abbasi and others, recalled that their apprehensions about the caretaker government being an extension of the PPP government had come true from the “massive rigging” as the elections turned out to be “transparently rigged” rather than being free and fair.In reply to a question, he alleged that a peaceful rally was fired upon from a petrol station owned by a PPP leader making the participants violent but they were restrained by their local leaders.

In reply to another question, Mr Shaikh denied the allegation of PPP leader Shazia Marri that she was deprived of the NA seat from Sanghar due to “large-scale rigging by PML-F men”. He said the constituency was an ancestral constituency of the Pagara family from where they repeatedly returned to the assemblies with thumping majorities.

Sardar Rahim, who was a candidate for PS-114, said that like some other candidates he, too, was defeated by stuffing of ballot boxes with fake ballots, whose proof he had and would submit it to the election commission.