Yousaf Raza Gillani challenges the result of Senate Chairman Elections

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Lahore, 22nd March, 3:50, PM: Former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gillani has challenged the result of Senate Chairman elections.

Baaghi TV: According to reports, Yousaf Raza Gillani has challenged the results of the Senate chairman election in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Monday.

As per reports, the high court has accepted the petition, and IHC Chief Justice Athar Minallah will preside over the hearing scheduled for March 24 (Wednesday).

According to reports from Dawn News, Farooq H. Naek filed the petition on Gillani’s behalf which named presiding officer Syed Muzzafar Hussain Shah, the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, the Senate Secretariat and Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani as respondents.

The petition urged the court to nullify the election result and the decision to make Sadiq Sanjrani the Senate chairman.

The petition also urged the IHC to declare that the rejection of seven votes for Gillani as unlawful and thus take him back as a candidate for the Senate chairman.

The petition claimed that the presiding officer and the Senate secretary had shown their actions to be dishonest.

It stated, “They had unmistakenly allowed casting of vote through stamping in the box of the desired candidate and specified no place where the stamp had to be put yet when it came to counting of the votes, seven votes were rejected.”

The petition further stated, “The haphazard rejection of votes is an attempt to deprive the representatives of the people of Pakistan, it is an attempt to steal the elections with the use of the election machinery itself. This conduct is contrary to Article 19 of the Constitution and if it is not checked it will result in the collapse of the very basic structure upon which our Constitution is based.”

The petition also argued that an inspection of the rejected votes showed that the intention was to vote for Gillani and no one else.

The petition further read, “If the respondents are allowed to get away with their unlawful activities then it would allow for practices such as open rigging, threats and snatching of ballot papers to emerge in the upper house.

It is pertinent to mention here that the joint candidate of the Pakistan Democratic Movement’s (PDM) for the Senate chairman election, Yousuf Raza Gillani, had lost the election to the PTI’s Sadiq Sanjrani after 7 votes of his were rejected by the presiding officer.

Soon after the opposition had challenged the result of the election but were overruled by the presiding officer who said the votes had been rejected because they were not stamped correctly.

98 senators, in total, voted in the election, out of which Sanjrani won by getting 48 votes. With a total of 8 votes rejected, Gillani received 42 valid votes.

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