The India-born Mamnoon Hussain was Tuesday elected as 12th President of Pakistan.
Islamabad, July 30/Nationalturk – The India-born Mamnoon Hussain, who is a close aide of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was Tuesday elected as 12th President of Pakistan. He will replace the present president Asif Ali Zardari, whose term ends in September.
Mamnoon, 73, won the poll as he secured 277 votes from lawmakers in the National Assembly and the Senate.
He was elected by an electoral college comprising members of the two houses of parliament (National Assembly and Senate) and four provincial assemblies. Voting was held with secret ballots at two polling booths today.
According to the results, 277 votes were cast from the Senate and National Assembly in favour of Hussain, the candidate of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz (PML-N).
Mamnoon required 263 votes to win, a target his party was in a position to comfortably achieve.
34 votes were polled in favour of PTI candidate Justice (Retd) Wajihuddin Ahmed, while three votes were rejected by polling staff.
In the KP Assembly, 110 lawmakers voted in the presidential poll — 69 MPAs voted for Wajihuddin and 41 for Mamnoon. In Sindh Assembly, 69 out of 71 lawmakers cast their votes with 64 in favour of Mamnoon and five for the PTI candidate.
Officials said the Balochistan Assembly, 56 legislators voted with 55 in favour of the PML-N-backed candidate and one for the PTI-backed candidate. Results from the Punjab Assembly were still awaited, but the PML-N enjoys an absolute majority in the house.
Chief Justice Sindh High Court Musheer Alam, who was the presiding officer during the process, announced that Mamnoon got 24.76 votes in accordance with constitutional mechanism, whereas Wajih secured 1.93 votes.
Mamnoon will be sworn on September 9 at the presidency. He resigned his membership of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz (PML-N) soon after the election results were announced, in what is seen as a symbolic move to establish himself as a non-partisan president.
Hussain has been an active member of the PML-N since 1960s. He was governor of Sindh province in Pakistan from June to October 1999 when Sharif’s government was overthrown by the then army chief General (Retd) Parvez Musharraf.
The main opposition party and former ruling party Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) had withdrawn its candidate and boycotted the election over reservations on the decision of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to reschedule the poll. The presidential poll was supposed to be August 6 but Supreme court preponed it for July 30.
Hussain was born in Indian city of Agra
Born in the historic Indian city of Agra, Hussain belongs to the Urdu-speaking ethnic group that migrated from India during partition in 1947. The office of the President is ceremonial in Pakistan but he is still the constitutional chief of the armed forces but cannot order deployments.
He also appoints the services chiefs at the recommendation of the prime minister.
Pakistan so far had 11 presidents, out of which five were military generals. Four of them illegally got powers through coups, whereas first president Major Sikandar Mirza was elected in 1956 after the first Constitution was adopted.
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Faiz Ahmad / NationalTurk Pakistan News
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