ISLAMABAD - Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Senior Vice President Fawad Chaudhry has said that the ideal situation to deal with the crisis surrounding Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa elections is for the ruling parties, establishment, and the PTI to hold a meeting together. “The parties will have to sit together and bring a constitutional amendment with consensus to conduct elections at one time,” said Fawad when asked if the PTI would agree to hold polls on another date rather than May 14. A day earlier, the former ruling party once again extended a dialogue offer to the coalition government to finalise a date for the ‘national elections’ after the National Assembly passed a resolution rejecting the three-member Supreme Court bench’s verdict on the Punjab elections and made it binding on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his cabinet not to implement the decision. PTI Chairman Imran Khan — who has been demanding early elections across the country since his ouster in April last year — earlier said that he was ready to wait till October for polls if the PDM government shares a roadmap with him ensuring that everything would be in order.
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Fawad said that the PTI dissolved the provincial assemblies so that the incumbent government would conduct national elections, but it turned out that the ruling coalition does not even follow the Constitution or the law. “We thought that the government would not violate the Constitution, we did not think that this would happen. They resorted to brutality, put 10-year-olds in prison and inflicted torture. This reversal in a year is unimaginable,” he said. The political temperatures in the country flared on Tuesday last when a three-member bench of the Supreme Court unanimously declared the ECP order to delay the election in Punjab and KP unconstitutional. After the apex court’s order, the ECP notified May 14 as the election date, with the stalled polling process to resume on April 10.