PTI Secretary General Salman Akram Raja on Thursday announced that the party would hold a public gathering in the metropolis on September 6, criticising what he described as a “two-system” structure that offered separate standards of education, healthcare and justice to the rich and poor.

Speaking at a news conference at Insaf House, Raja said the deaths of 14 newborns at the PIMS in Islamabad were the result of systemic failure. “Today, our hearts are filled with grief. The deaths of 14 newborn babies at PIMS are an extremely tragic incident,” he said, questioning whether the country had learnt anything from repeated institutional failures.

Raja said merely identifying where the system had failed was not enough and called for fundamental reforms to ensure state institutions served ordinary citizens. “We have imposed two systems in this country – one for the rich and another for the poor,” he said, adding that the poor were denied access to the same education and healthcare facilities available to affluent families.

He recalled that government schools had been relatively effective until the 1980s, when children from different social classes studied together. He said the subsequent expansion of expensive English-medium schools had widened the education gap.