After a rather troubled polling day, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has managed to secure a comfortable win in Karachi’s PS-88 Malir by-election for a seat in the Sindh Assembly, unofficial results issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) have revealed.
But does that mean that the people of Karachi are done with Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) amid economic among other challenges faced by the country?
According to journalist Ajmal Jami, that might be the case, at least in Malir, and here’s why…
The PPP was the only party that not only retained the number of votes received in the 2018 general election, but went on to secure even more.
The PPP secured 24,251 votes in the 2021 by-election as compared to 22,561 in 2018, whereas the PTI and its allied Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) received merely 4,870 votes against 2018’s 16,386 and 2,635 votes against 5,207, respectively.
Hardliner Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), which had received 7,694 votes in 2018, bagged only 6,090 this year.
Earlier, polling for the PS-88 by-election — that was slated to be a hot contest between the PPP and PTI — was marred by allegations of vote rigging, violence and intimidation as all contesting parties traded charges against each other.
The winning candidate, PPP’s Yousuf Murtaza Baloch, is the son of Murtaza Baloch, the former minister for human settlement.
The seat fell vacant after Murtaza died of COVID-19 in June last year.
