File photo. Aamir Qureshi—AFP
Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) leader Nawaz Sharif on Monday maintained neither he, nor his party, are interested in pursuing any political vendetta against their opponents, adding Allah will not forgive them.
“We have no desire for revenge … we do not want any revenge,” he told a meeting of PMLN office-bearers in Punjab via video-link from London. “However, Allah does not forgive people who make people suffer,” he added. Reiterating allegations that former Army chief General (retd.) Qamar Javed Bajwa and Lt. Gen. (retd.) Faiz Hameed had colluded with former chief justices Saqib Nisar and Asif Saeed Khosa to oust him from power, he questioned why there was no accountability for their actions, which had damaged the country.
“Four judges sit and send home a prime minister with the mandate of millions of people,” he said. “[This was done] by Gen. Bajwa and Gen. Faiz, and their tools were Saqib Nisar and Asif Saeed Khosa,” he claimed, lamenting that he and other PMLN leaders, including members of his family, had been sentenced to jail without committing any crime.
Regretting that his party had paid the price for growing Pakistan economically, he questioned why the people who had brought the country to its current state were getting relief from courts in a seeming reference to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan. “By the grace of Allah, the country became a nuclear power in our time … the person who made the country a nuclear power was deported, imprisoned and sentenced to 27 years by the court of terrorism,” he said, referring to his time as prime minister.
Addressing the inflation inflicted on the public under the tenure of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM)-led government—led by his brother Shehbaz Sharif—he claimed the “harsh” steps taken had saved the country from default while sacrificing the PMLN’s political capital. Had the PDM government not saved the country from financial default, he claimed, petrol prices in Pakistan would have crossed Rs. 1,000/liter by now.
The thrice-elected prime minister claimed that neighboring India had reached the moon and hosted a G20 summit because its leaders had not been targeted. He claimed that when he became the prime minister in December 1990, India had been imitating Pakistan’s economic reforms. “Where has India reached today by replicating our economic agenda and where are we left? When Vajpayee became prime minister, India did not have $1 billion in the treasury, but today it has foreign reserves of $600 billion,” he said. “Today, the prime minister of Pakistan is forced to extend his hand in front of other countries,” he lamented, referring to the begging bowl Pakistan is trapped in to meet debt servicing and government expenditures.