• Party leaders present election rigging, harassment claims at House of Lords hearing with Priti Patel, Sayeeda Warsi etc in attendance
• Tory peer proposes ways party can bring its case before US, Australian legislatures

LONDON: Although its cause has always found sympathetic ears in Western democracies, British parliamentarians hinted that they would like to help the PTI ‘internationalise’ its case over the alleged intimidation and harassment faced by the party following its ouster from power in 2022.

The remarks, made by Conservative peer Lord Daniel Hannan, came during a hearing held at the House of Lords on Tuesday, which saw more than a dozen parliamentarians listen as PTI figures detailed allegations of electoral fraud, the breakdown of rule of law and prolonged incarceration of party leader Imran Khan, as well as growing censorship and intimidation by way of arrests and abductions.

Jointly hosted by Lord Hannan and British Pakistani Labour MP Naz Shah, the event was also attended by former Tory home secretary Priti Patel, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Lord Tariq Ahmad of Wimbledon and Labour MP Naushaba Khan, among others.

The meeting comes weeks after the US House of Represe­ntatives adopted a bi-partisan resolution with an overwhelming majority, demanding a probe into the February 8 elections and condemning widespread human rights violations in Pakistan.

This concern also echoed during Tuesday’s discussion, when Naz Shah joked to Priti Patel that if Pakistan-style vote-counting took place in the UK, “your party would still be in government”.

Lord Hannan opened by saying that as friends of Pakistan “we cannot be indifferent to what is happening in a friendly country”.

“I reiterate the point that we are friends of Pakistan. This is not an anti-Pakistan meeting — it’s a pro-Pakistan meeting,” Naz Shah stressed.

Ms Shah added that in the past she has spoken not only about the arrests of journalists in Pakis­tan but also about “what is happening in Bangladesh or in Modi’s India when it comes to press freedom and minority rights”.

“You can either be on the right side of human rights or not — you can’t pick and choose. We use a similar yardstick across the globe but Pakistan is closer in terms of vested interests for me.”

During his remarks, the Tory peer suggested that British parliamentarians could “internationalise this issue [of PTI intimidation] beyond the UK.”

“I would like us to do a cross party letter from our colleagues to elected members across the US and Australia,” he said, as several lawmakers asked the PTI leaders what “tangible steps” can be taken by them to address this issue.

Election issues

Activist Sarwar Bari, who also heads the Pattan Development Organi­sation which recently published a review of election documentation that supported the PTI’s accounts of irregularities and rigging in the election process, also addressed the room.

“We are auditing election commission data. In the latest audit, we reviewed all the Form 47 election results of constituencies. Out of 265 constituencies where elections were held, we found serious problems in 208 Form 47s, such as calculation errors. In 74pc of the forms, officials didn’t write their names or the place where elections were held,” he said.

He told parliamentarians that election officials uploaded the incorrect documents to their website to show election results, and changed them later.

Meher Bano Qureshi, the daughter of incarcerated former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and a candidate in the Feb 8 polls, described the exercise as “unprecedented election with fascist tactics”.

She claimed the PTI was “banned, not allowed on TV, no one could take Imran Khan’s name, and our entire leadership was in jail and remains in jail”.

Ms Qureshi concluded by stressing the importance of an audit of the election process. “The people of Pakistan are being told, “your vote doesn’t matter, your voice doesn’t matter.” I’m asking you to speak for the people and democracy in Pakistan.”

Former Imran Khan confidant and aide, Zulfi Bukhari, said that he and the party were under considerable pressure over the event.

“This event was being so heavily monitored that there was a crackdown on my media team, members of which were abducted at 3am. The same thing happened to our information secretary. The louder the international media gets, the more pressure comes on us.”

He also claimed that one of their social media leads was told not to attend the event.

“We are putting a lot of hope in the judiciary. It is not perfect, but judges standing up will drive this forward — we don’t want special treatment. We just want the rule of law,” he said.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2024