CHITRAL: Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has said that both ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan will be eliminated in next year’s general elections and the PPP will gain a landslide victory after contesting the polls on the basis of its policies aimed at ameliorating the conditions of the poor across the country.

Addressing a public meeting at the Polo Ground here on Saturday during his first visit to Chitral, he said Mr Sharif had been disqualified because of his own follies as he had not cooperated with the PPP to repeal the articles introduced into the Constitution by a military dictator.

“He intended to use these discriminatory and controversial articles against others but he himself fell prey to them and was sent packing,” the PPP chief said.

He said the accountability of Mr Sharif was still not over and the magnitude of his corruption was so large that his politics would come to an end by next year because his wrongdoings would have been exposed before the people.

PTI chief also criticised at Chitral public meeting

The PPP chairman said corruption was the biggest problem of the country and there should be across-the-board accountability so that corrupt politicians could be ousted from the political arena and the looted wealth was recovered from them.

He said the PTI chief’s politics revolved around accusations and he had befooled the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who were now suffering because of bad governance and rampant corruption. He said the involvement of the KP chief minister in corruption had been pointed out by none other than his own minister and a woman member of the National Assembly from his party.

“The only change is that the kitchen of Imran Khan at Banigala and the aeroplane owned by Jahangir Tareen are run by earnings made from the contracts of development works in the province,” he alleged, adding that the PTI government had miserably failed to deliver and 45 per cent of the budget lapsed every year because it could not be utilised due to its incompetence.

He said Mr Khan was commenting about Supreme Court judges in public meetings, which might lead to their politicisation.

The PPP chief urged the court to take up a number of cases of importance to national politics that had been pending for a long time, including the Asghar Khan case about election funding and a reference about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging.

PPP programme

He said the PPP had chalked out a manifesto and a programme that would prove to be a panacea for the problems of the poor people who had suffered for long.

He said education and health would get high priority, peasants would be given loans and subsidised agricultural implements, while the youth would also get special attention in the party’s plans.

The PPP chief said that whenever the PPP came to power, it launched record development projects, including the Lowari Tunnel on which work began in 1975 and it was converted into a road tunnel from rail in 2010.

Provincial PPP chief Humayun Khan, district president Salim Khan and MPA from Chitral Syed Sardar Hussain also spoke.

The PPP chairman was accompanied by party leaders Farhatullah Babar, Sherry Rahman, Senator Rubina Khalid and Nadeem Afzal Chan.

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2017