WASHINGTON: Federal Interior and Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal on Friday urged Pakistan Army’s chief spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor to refrain from making comments on the national economy.

“Such irresponsible statements can dent Pakistan’s global image,” the minister, who is currently in Washington, said in a statement to the media.

On his Twitter account, Mr Iqbal underlined the reforms his government had undertaken to enhance the economy. “The government has turned around Pakistan’s economy in the past four years, through policies of economic, infrastructure and development reforms,” he wrote.

“Pakistan’s economy is strong and stable,” he said in the statement. “The government is executing the largest development budget in the country’s history.”

Mr Iqbal pointed out that the government was also providing resources to law enforcement agencies for carrying out security operations.

In a series of tweets, he said Pakistan’s economy was much better than what it was in 2013, when the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz took over the government.

“The tax base has doubled. The economy is strong and there’s no need for us to go to IMF (for another bailout package),” he wrote.

The minister’s statement follows remarks made by Inter-Services Public Relations chief Maj Gen Ghafoor during a TV programme on Thursday night that the country’s economic health, if not bad, was not good either. He emphasised the need for consultations on the matter and said that Chief of the Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa had also made some suggestions in this regard.

The ISPR chief noted that the economy and security were interlinked and if economy was not satisfactory then the country’s security obviously got affected.

The ISPR did not comment on the minister’s remarks.

Meanwhile, in a bid to control damage, Mr Iqbal appeared on a private news channel in the evening and clarified that his statement did not mean to critcise anyone or initiate some confrontation.

Insisting that the ISPR chief’s statement was ‘inappropriate’, he said in remarks to Geo News that whatever the army chief had said in Karachi about economy “ we all are in agreement that [we have] to improve the taxes [collection]”.

However, his criticism of the ISPR chief’s statement angered Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan, who took to Twitter to lash out at Mr Iqbal and said his statement aimed to “malign the armed forces of Pakistan & appease hostile external powers”.

He tweeted: “Ahsan Iqbal’s unwarranted attack on ISPR is absurd bec[ause] the dismal state of Pak’s economy is known to the world.”

In another tweet he blamed ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Finance Miniser Ishaq Dar for crushing “the nation under debt for generations to come. The Sharif darbaris cannot fool the nation.”

In the last tweet, the PTI chief also equated the interior minister’s statement with the news leak controversy.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2017