Pakistan: PPP asks govt to avoid ‘witch hunting’ of leaders

The Punjab and Lahore chapters of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) have condemned biased and tainted campaign of political persecution and victimisation of former prime ministers Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani and Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and former federal minister Makhdoom Amin Faheem.

PPP leaders including Haider Zaman Qureshi, Abid Sadiqui, Samina Khalid Ghurki, Khuram Farooq and others said in a statement on Monday that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leadership should come out clean if it wanted to undo and undermine the policy of reconciliation agreed by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and enshrined in the Charter of Democracy. PPP leaders were neither afraid of such concocted and baseless cases nor of facing intimidated courts or for that matter in being in jails as such efforts miserably failed in the past to compel the PPP leaders into making compromises, they said, adding that let the PML-N be warned that if it continued the witch-hunting behind the facade of sham accountability, the PPP too would be forced to reconsider its policy of reconciliation.

Criticising the statement of Information Minister Senator Pervaiz Rashid, the PPP leaders stated that we know that courts were independent but that investigations of FIA were based on surmises and conjectures and mala fide intent. The courts were misguided that the PPP leaders had not responded to the notices when in fact proper replies had been sent. They said that under Article 248 of the constitution, the former prime ministers had immunity for official acts. He further said that the prime minister was not directly responsible for actions in any subordinate office under a ministry and that the cabinet took national policy decisions collectively and transparently and singling out any former prime minister was patently wrong and absurd. The FIA under the direction of the government deliberately and intentionally did not submit facts of the case and misguided the courts to get warrants for PPP leader issued which was proof of mala fide on the part of the agency.

PPP leaders also said that it seemed that the PMLN after having miserably failed on the governance front had also failed in tackling inflation, power outages and terrorism to stabilise the economy.

They said that pressurising the largest party of the opposition by such politics of vendetta was surely to backfire and would culminate into a grand alliance of the opposition against the ruling party.