ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) chief Imran Khan is seeking support of influential spiritual leaders and religious clerics before the elections on July 25, causing analysts to warn this may lead to an upsurge of extremism in the country.
“We are a Muslim-majority nation and there is nothing wrong in discussing religion in public rallies,” Azhar Laghari, head of PTI’s public relations wing, told Arab News on Sunday.
He said Khan had recently visited a number of spiritual and religious leaders across the Punjab province on their invitation.
“We are seeking their support because they have a huge following in their respective areas,” he added. “If their support can help us win elections, why shouldn’t we approach them?”
Laghari said his party was trying to unite the nation by relying on the teachings of Islam. “Peace and love is the message of our religion and we are trying to spread it through our massive public rallies,” he noted.
However, the PTI chairman touched upon a politically sensitive subject while addressing a gathering of religious clerics and custodians of different shrines on Saturday, demanding that a committee report on a now-withdrawn controversial amendment to the Khatam-e-Nabuwat (finality of prophethood) oath be made public.
“The report should be made public so that people find out why the amendment was made,” Khan said. “All those who were part of this conspiracy should be punished.”
Zahid Hamid, law minister in the last Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) administration, had to resign over the issue, after violent protests across the country against his government, since he was thought to be at the center of the Khatam-e-Nabuwat controversy.
Senator Mushahidullah Khan, PML-N’s central information secretary, told Arab News that all parliamentary parties were part of the Electoral Reforms Committee that introduced the controversial amendment to the oath.
“It was a collective mistake and was immediately rectified when brought to the notice of the government,” he said.
Khan added that the PML-N’s political rivals were trying to fan hatred among the public to extract political mileage, though he hoped that they would fail miserably. “People are well aware of our ideology and will vote for us on July 25 despite the propaganda of our opponents,” he said.
He also challenged popular public perception, noting that a large number of spiritual leaders and custodians of different shrines were still supporting PML-N in the next elections.
According to a research conducted by Dr. Adeel Malik, who teaches development economics at Oxford University, there are about 64 shrines in the province of Punjab with direct political connections.
Imran Khan seeks spiritual and religious leaders’ support as election nears
Imran Khan seeks spiritual and religious leaders’ support as election nears
- PTI says it is trying to unite people by using Islam’s message of peace and love
- Analysts say parties should contest elections on basis of their manifestos and performance, not religion
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
