ISLAMABAD: The United States described the formation of a new government as Pakistan’s internal matter on Tuesday, though it reiterated that any administration in Islamabad should transparently investigate the allegations of election irregularities and emphasized the need for unrestricted Internet access amid social media blockages in the country.
The February 8 general polls in Pakistan were marred by a nationwide outage of cellphone networks and delays in reporting constituency results by election officials, leading to speculation that the final results were manipulated to benefit certain political factions.
While several parties expressed skepticism toward the election outcome, resulting in a split mandate, and organized protests in different cities, the allegations of rigging were most forcefully made by former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which claimed its mandate had been compromised in the process.
Having lost its election symbol in a legal battle just days before the polls, the PTI candidates were forced to enter the political contest as independents and emerged as the largest bloc in the National Assembly of Pakistan. However, they were unable to form the central government on their own, as they did not secure victory under any party platform.
PTI’s opponents – the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – benefitted from the situation and announced the formation of a coalition government on Tuesday night after lengthy negotiations, despite winning a smaller number of seats.
“I don’t want to get into an internal Pakistani matter, which I very much believe that the formation of a new government is,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said while responding to a question about the possibility of the US to ask Pakistani authorities to respect PTI’s mandate. “So, that’s a matter that I will leave to Pakistan. But as I said, when it comes to the – any claims of interference or allegations of irregularities, we want to see those fully investigated.”
Miller also expressed concern over the intermittent blockages of platform X, formerly Twitter, in Pakistan during recent days.
The social media platform has mostly remained inaccessible since Saturday when a senior bureaucrat accused Pakistan’s chief justice and the top election commission official of being involved in rigging the elections.
“I don’t have any updates on whether it’s something that’s been raised, but we always want to see full Internet freedom around the world, and that includes the availability of platforms that people use to communicate with each other,” he said.
“I’ll just say as a general matter that we want that to – we want Internet platforms to … be available to people in Pakistan and around the world,” he continued. “And I don’t have anything further than that.”
