HYDERABAD: Jamaat-i-Islami deputy emir Dr Mairajul Huda Siddiqui has termed Feb 8 general elections unique in the country`s history in the sense it declared winners as losers and handed down victory to the rejected ones.

He said at a news conference at local press club on Saturday that JI rejected the badly rigged polls. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had become a farce as all the worst fears expressed earlier about the conduct of elections had proved right, he said.

He announced that JI would hold protest on Feb 11 in Hyderabad against the brazenly committed rigging. The ECP had failed to hold free, fair and transparent elections and allarrangements it had made for transparency of polls hadproved ineffective, he said.

He said that either security institutions had themselves become a party or they preferred to remain silent spectators when the rigging was being committed before their very eyes. Ballot papers were snatched under the very nose of the security personnel and they did nothing, he said.

He said that women were slapped by a group of criminals who had trespassed into a women`s polling station and polling staff was mostly inexperienced. Presiding officers (POs), who were largely teachers, were also humiliated by the miscreants when they were leaving the polling station, he said, adding that most female POs had complained about the incident.

He said that ROs had provided Form-45 and 46 quite late and then Form-47 was issued after a considerable delay. The results on the basis of Form-47 were tantamount to fraudwith people, he said.

He said that JI rejected the results and called for issuance of results in line with Form-45. He warned that the government that would to be formed with the backing of establishment would be too fragile to survive.

Siddiqui said that the polls had been badly exposed and even a child was blaming powerful institutions of the country for this farce. It was dangerous for the state to become controversial. A similar situation had in past led to the dismemberment of the country but regretfully no one had learnt any lesson from it, he said.

He warned state institutions to treat everyone equally and said that ECP had become an ineffective body which had allowed itself to become subservient to powerful elites.

Democracy was murdered in Hyderabad in the name of democracy, he said.