LAHORE: Former President Asif Ali Zardari has claimed that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz is trying to establish backdoor contacts with the Pakistan People’s Party.

“The PML-N is trying to establish backdoor contacts with us but I’ve refused to communicate with the intermediaries,” Mr Zardari was quoted as telling party ticket-holders from Lahore here on Monday.

“I’m not ready to talk with Nawaz Sharif over phone, what to talk of meeting him in person,” the party’s top spokesperson Chaudhry Manzoor quoted Mr Zardari as saying in the meeting.

Flanked by senior party leader Nadeem Afzal Chan, he said the PPP had signed the Charter of Democracy (CoD) with the PML-N, overlooking the fact that Mr Sharif “deceived” the PPP leadership by striking an underhand deal with the Musharraf regime and going into exile.

But even after the CoD, Mr Sharif cheated the party by joining the Supreme Court hearing in Memogate case and then after the Islamabad sit-ins, he said, adding the party was not ready to be cheated yet another time.

Ch Manzoor said Mr Zardari also told the meeting that barter trade system had been agreed upon among Islamabad, Beijing, Tehran and Ankara when the PPP was in power but the PML-N government regrettably quashed the programme. He added that now the PML-N was solely claiming credit for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

He also quoted the ex-president as saying that Finance Minister Ishaq Dar who knew nothing about economy, was damaging the country.

Mr Chan, referring to Nawaz Sharif’s call for a new social contract, said he was doing so “to save his own skin and money”.

He said the ousted prime minister could not forget the nationalisation of large industrial and commercial entities by the first PPP government in 1970s (when the Sharifs’ steel mills was also taken over), while this time the politics that was privatised by Nawaz Sharif and handed over to the corporate sector, would be nationalised.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2017