GUJRAT: Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain on Sunday berated the opposition for another attempt to oust the democratically elected government.

“It has no guts and prowess to bring a no-trust motion,” said Fawad who added that the opposition had made such an abortive bid earlier and its current endeavour would also meet the same fate.

The no-trust move can succeed only when the opposition parties are standing on their own feet, but not through beseeching or hatching conspiracies,” the minister told reporters in Mandi Bahauddin.

Fawad said that the very next day of their announcement, he had challenged the opposition to table the no-confidence motion. However, they had not yet given any date for the purpose as they had preempted their defeat. Pakistan, he said, could not be handed over to Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and Maulana Fazlur Rehman. The people could not be deceived anymore as they had tried them earlier.

The Pakistan Peoples Party, the minister said, had never done ‘religious politics’, but its chairman Bilawal now stood by Maulana Fazlur Rehman who, he believed, could bring out students of seminaries for the public meetings and long marches. Bilawal knew that his party was no more a crowd puller and, therefore, he was relying on Fazl for his political survival.

The minister held Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif responsible for relegating their once mainstream political parties to regional ones, and said now their last hope was Maulana Fazl, who, ironically, failed to blackmail the government in the past by bringing the seminary students to Islamabad.

“This time it will not be different and we will get rid of their blackmailing once and for all,” he said.

The minister sarcastically remarked that the PTI could rent them out the container used by the party during their struggle against the corrupt rulers.

As regards the ongoing accountability drive, he said Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Safdar had been convicted for their corruption, while Shehbaz Sharif and Hamza Shehbaz would be indicted in the money laundering case soon. He once again reiterated the demand for live broadcast of the court proceedings of Shehbaz Sharif’s cases as it would help the media and the public analyse the money laundering evidence against the PML-N president.

When the PTI came into the power, he said, the country’s economy was on the verge of default due to poor economic policies of “Ishaq Dar and company”. Prime Minister Imran Khan implemented prudent policies to stabilise the economy.

Now the economy was growing at 5.37 per cent due to robust economic activity in the agriculture and industrial sectors, he added.

The minister said, “There was no restriction on the media.” The cable operators themselves took notice of the immorality displayed on a TV talk show by those who were not even the journalists.

He pledged to protect the journalists’ rights across the country.

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2022