MULTAN: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said he had no grudge against Jahangir Khan Tareen and Chaudhry Sarwar.

Speaking at a workers’ convention here on Thursday, Qureshi said when he had left to perform Hajj, he decided to forgive and forget everyone.

“Imran Khan needs sincere friends. Whatever the issues with Jahangir Tareen were, I buried these when I left for Hajj. I also met Governor Chaudhry Sarwar before going to Hajj,” he said.

“I also have also no grudges against Salman Naeem” (a candidate who defeated him in independent capacity and later joined the PTI).

He said Pakistan would have been declared defaulter if the UAE and Saudi Arab would not have supported it.

Speaking to the media after inaugurating several development schemes in his constituency, he said the US or any other third force should play its role in the Kashmir issue as there are no chances of dialogue with India in the prevailing situation of Jammu and Kashmir.

He said the opposition parties lacked consensus over the sit-in in Islamabad.

“The PML-N is divided over the issue of sit-in and Shahbaz Sharif in his two-hour long meeting admitted that the sit-in decision of JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman was not a right one and the PML-N should not cooperate with him. However, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif is in favour of participating and supporting the sit-in.

“Similarly, the PPP is also divided. When the PTI had held a sit-in in the past, Bilawal Bhutto was of the view that the politics of protest was damaging democracy. Is there no chance of derailment of democracy as Bilawal is saying that his party will welcome the sit-in despite the fact that he was against such a policy in the past,” he said. He said the PTI sit-in was peaceful.

“Everybody including the media knows the purpose behind the Maulana’s politics of sit-in,” he said.

He said Oct 27 would be observed as a day of solidarity with the Kashmiri people in each city. The government, he said, had directed the country’s foreign diplomatic missions to observe the day as black day.

Qureshi inaugurated five projects of roads in Shah Rukn-e-Alam Colony which would be completed at a cost of Rs83.24 million.

Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2019