SUKKUR: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhu­tto-Zardari on Tuesday annou­n­ced that his party workers would hold a sit-in in Rawalpindi if Prime Minister Imran Khan was not removed from his office before January 2020.

Speaking to party workers at the residence of jailed MNA Syed Khursheed Ahmed Shah in Sukkur and later talking to the media, Mr Bhutto-Zardari said: “If the puppet prime minister is not removed before January 2020, then I will not be able to stop workers of Shaheed Bhutto from holding a sit-in in Rawalpindi”. He declared: “We will stay on [in the sit-in] even if more [PPP] leaders are arrested or all of us are blown up with bombs”.

The PPP chairman argued that it was not the work of intelligence agencies to go after politicians; rather, their job was to keep a check on terrorists; their job was to help resolve the Kashmir issue and unearth conspiracies against the country.

“But [intelligence agencies’] people are sitting in the investigation teams formed against Asif Ali Zardari,” he observed.

He wondered whether these [intelligence] people while sitting in the investigation teams scrutinised the bills of his [Bilawal’s] breakfast, washing and dry cleaning, etc to produce something for the “fake” reference prepared against him.

Mr Bhutto-Zardari observed that for the first time in the history of Pakistan, an “inefficient and incompetent prime minister” was representing Pakistan in the United States. He particularly criticised the prime minister’s reported statement about to Al Qaeda in the US.

“We condemn his statement and demand its immediate withdrawal by him,” the PPP chairman said.

Mentioning that his father MNA Asif Ali Zardari and aunt MPA Faryal Talpur were arrested in Rawalpindi, where his grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed and mother Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, he alleged that “undemocratic forces want to build pressure upon us through such tactics”.

He said they were sadly mistaken to think that soldiers of Bhutto could bow to such pressures. “We have faced dictators like Ziaul Haq, Yahya Khan and Pervez Musharraf ... they were finally removed from their offices ... the puppet government could not withstand the spirit of jialas ... we are not afraid of arrests ... go ahead with as many arrests as you like ...” he went on to say.

Mr Bhutto-Zardari claimed that the arrests of political figures at the behest of undemocratic forces were meant to pave the way for a takeover of Karachi and to deprive the masses of their rights. “But we will not let them achieve their goals,” he said, adding that the PPP would foil all conspiracies against the 18th Constitutional Amendment. There would be no bargaining on principles and rights of the masses, he said.

The PPP chairman also commented on rumours of a deal between authorities and incarcerated political leaderships, claiming “they have repeatedly offered a deal but we [political leaderships] are not accepting the offers”.

Regarding Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Islamabad lockdown by the name of ‘Azadi march’ to oust the prime minister, Mr Bhutto-Zardari said the PPP and JUI-F stances were identical that the ‘selected government’ was installed through rigging, but that party was planning its drive on its own and the PPP would support it.

Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, Nafeesa Shah, Awais Shah, Syed Nasir Hussain Shah and other PPP leaders were accompanying the party chairman.

Criticising arrests of Sindh Assembly Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani, MNA Syed Khursheed Shah and other leaders by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), he argued that everywhere in the world proof and evidence was collected before arresting a person but here in Pakistan, people were arrested first without bearing proofs or evidence.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2019