LAHORE: The Pakistan Peoples Party has supported the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’ call for new elections in the country.

“There is nothing wrong in it if someone is demanding that this government should go. The demand for new polls in not undemocratic. What [else] can be done in case of failure of a government,” Punjab PPP president Qamar Zaman Kaira told a press conference here on Tuesday.

“Re-election or in-house change are the two options to get rid of an incapable government,” he said while responding to a query.

He, however, sarcastically said that demanding general election afresh from the incumbent setup is a useless effort as it’s unable even to conduct local body polls.

Flanked by Chaudhry Manzoor, Aslam Gill and Malik Usman, Mr Kaira said judiciary must not intervene in the affairs of the executive because the former didn’t have experience of running the country.

He termed Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi ‘over-ambitious’ and recalled that the latter had quit the PPP government on change of his portfolio but used as cover the release of Raymond Davis, a US citizen who had shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore when the PPP was in power.

The decision to release Davis was unanimous, all federal and provincial governments, state institutions, agencies and courts were on board, claimed Mr Kaira, who was then a member of the federal cabinet.

The PPP leader argued that the National Finance Commission and 18th amendment strengthened the federation and weakened nationalists and separatist movements and vowed to resist any move to reverse the steps. He said the amendment was in line with the promise made by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah with the provinces as enshrined in the 1940 Resolution and that the country was bifurcated in 1971 because of violating this promise.

Saying the issue is not distribution but collection of resources, he lamented that the PTI government failed to collect revenue as the PPP had (in 2008-13) taken the tax collection up to Rs2,200 billion and the PML-N had (in 2014-18) almost doubled the collection.

He challenged the government to give details of the Rs1,240 billion ‘fraud’ package given in the wake of coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Kaira lamented that misleading reports about Asif Ali Zardari were being deliberately spread.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2020