Imran Khan, the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), would write a letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanding that it stop its support for Pakistan due to “rigged elections,” party leader Ali Zafar stated on Thursday.
“Imran Khan will send a letter to the IMF today. The charters of the IMF, EU, and other institutions state that they can only function or lend to a country if there is strong governance,” Zafar told reporters after seeing Khan at Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail.
Zafar asserted that the “most important section” of their charter is for a country to be democratic. “If there’s no democracy, then neither can these institutions function in those countries, nor should they.”
“Free and fair elections are the foundation of a democracy. However, the entire world witnessed how the nation’s mandate was stolen. Let’s leave pre-poll cheating aside; victory was stolen from the PTI’s winning candidates through post-poll manipulation.
Senator Zafar said that the people’s votes were taken in the darkness of night. He stated that going to the IMF for a rescue package would be detrimental to the country without first undertaking an audit of the election results.
He also expressed disappointment that he had not been granted permission to meet Khan’s wife Bushra Bibi, who is being held in the Bani Gala mansion, which has been declared a sub-jail.
This is not the first time the opposition party PTI has attempted to derail the IMF deal; in 2022, its ex-leader Shaukat Tarin told PTI’s then-finance ministers of KP and Punjab that they should “tell the IMF that the commitment made to them cannot be fulfilled” and cite the recent devastation caused by floods in the country as the reason.
Last year, Pakistan received a short-term $3 billion program from the IMF, which helped to prevent a sovereign debt default. It will expire next month, and obtaining a new, considerably larger one is largely seen as the top priority for the next administration.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and its supporters have reached an agreement to create a coalition government, while the PTI and several other political parties have rejected the polls and declared nationwide protests.
The PTI has demanded that election results be announced using Form 45, the results of a single polling station, rather than Form 47, the aggregated results of a constituency, claiming that the latter was tampered with and that its independent candidates gained a simple majority in the National Assembly.
