First Rally of Opposition’s Alliance against Imran Khan’s Rule succeeds to Draw Tens of Thousands

On Friday, an alliance of Pakistan’s political parties in opposition organized an anti-government demonstration which apparently succeeded to gather thousands of protestors, with the opponents of the premier describing the scenes as the beginning of the end for the government. 

The alliance of eleven political parties in opposition, with the name of Pakistan’s Democratic Movement (PDM), held their first rally in Gujranwala on Friday. The rally was in line with the movement’s sole purpose of dethroning Prime Minister Imran Khan. 

Leader of the Pakistan Democratic Movement, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, while addressing the crowd of thousands, said that the government is illegal which the establishment has forced upon the nation and that he does not approve of this illegal rule. 

More than five hundred of the opposition’s main activists and figures, most of which belonged to the opposition party Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz (PML-N), were reported to have been arrested by the government a night before the protest. 

General Secretary of PML-N, Ahsan Iqbal, said that the police in Gujranwala and Punjab tried to jump over the walls and enter the worker’s houses, arrested them, and filed false cases against them.

Fore fronted by three prominent political parties of Pakistan, namely Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), PML-N, and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), the PDM is the first alliance in the history of Pakistan that all political parties in opposition are coming at the military and its interference in politics as one. 

The alliance accuses the military of having colossal unaccounted power in the country and manipulating the 2018’s election and bringing Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf to the rule. The military is also blamed to be using Prime Minister Imran Khan as a puppet for its agenda. 

The PDM plans to be holding a number of protests and rallies over the coming weeks and eventually embarking on the long march to the Parliament in the country’s capital, Islamabad, next year; all of this to continue until PTI’s government is ousted. In addition to this, the use of mass resignations and no-confidence votes in the parliament is one of the weapons that the opposition plans on to get Imran Khan to step down from his position. 

Apart from protests by the opposition, Imran Khan’s government is already in the midst of several crises, including a declining economy, the highest inflation rate in Asia, and unemployment. 

Moreover, the coronavirus pandemic has further worsened the economic condition of the country as the country’s economy, for the first time, contracts in sixty-eight years in June. 

However, Pakistan is still being lauded by the world leaders for managing the entire pandemic situation quite well so far as compared to the neighboring country, India.