Former prime ministers Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Raja Pervez Ashraf and former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Akram Khan Durrani on Wednesday questioned Prime Minister Imran Khan’s silence over the controversial arrest of PML-N leader Capt (r) Safdar from a hotel in Karachi, a private TV channel reported.
Addressing a press conference in Islamabad on Wednesday, former PM Abbasi said that he expresses solidarity with the Sindh government and also extended his support to Sindh Police for taking a ‘principled stance’ on the matter. “Every citizen in Sindh is feeling insecure,” he said.
He said that had the constitution reigned supreme, the prime minister would have made a phone call to Chief Minister Sindh Murad Ali Shah after such events transpired. “But did the prime minister deliver a speech? Did he issue a statement?” asked the PML-N stalwart.
Addressing PM Imran Khan directly, he continued to ask, “Do you not care about the federation? Are you worried at all about the provinces?” Abbasi then went on to say that the prime minister instead is concerned about “what food should be given to Shahbaz Sharif in jail”. “He is completely unaware of the pain and misery of the common man,” he said of the prime minister.
The PML-N leader accused the prime minister of ‘resorting to any means possible to torture his political opponents’. “We condemn all of this,” he declared.
Addressing the media, former PM Ashraf seconded Abbasi in questioning why there had been no statement from any government representative – ministers or the prime minister himself. “The federal government, under a planned conspiracy, seeks to spread chaos in the country,” he alleged, adding that through ‘systematic planning’ it wants to ‘destabilise the country’.
Ashraf praised the manner in which PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and the Sindh government had handled matters a day prior. He said that the prime minister had become irked after witnessing the scale of the gathering at the Pakistan Democratic Movement rally held in Karachi on Sunday.
Referring to the various statements by federal ministers in criticism of the rally, Ashraf said that the spokespersons are ‘dragging national institutions into politics’. “The prime minister should have come forward and laid down the facts before the nation. He should have spoken to Chief Minister Sindh Murad Ali Shah,” the PPP leader said, adding that the prime minister instead ‘has gone into hiding and adopted an indifferent stance’.
Meanwhile, JUI-F’s Durrani said that the country is going through a ‘grave crisis’. “Such incidents have never before occurred in the country’s history. The opposition had said on the first day that this is a fake government, they do not accept it,” he said.
