Meeting on polls among PDM, PTI, establishment 'ideal' situation: Fawad

• Fawad says parties will have to bring constitutional amendment with consensus.
  
• He says PTI dissolved assemblies so that elections would be held. 
• We thought government would not break Constitution, he says. 

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Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Senior Vice President Fawad Chaudhry 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 "minority" 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.

"The government rejected the Supreme Court's verdict, is not following the constitution and holding elections, this attitude by the government is not how a country is run," said the former minister. 

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 break 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 when a three-member bench of the Supreme Court unanimously declared the Election Commission of Pakistan's (ECP) order to delay the election in Punjab and KP "unconstitutional".

The three-member bench — led by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Ata Bandial and comprising Justice Munib Akhtar, and Justice Ijaz Ul Ahsan — ordered the electoral watchdog to hold the election in Punjab on May 14 — the verdict strongly opposed by the incumbent government.

The ECP postponed the date of the election in Punjab to October 8 — initially scheduled to take place on April 30 — citing a resurgence of terror attacks, a shortage of security personnel and an unprecedented economic crisis.

After the apex court's order, the election commission notified May 14 as the election date, with the stalled polling process to resume on April 10.