LAHORE: Former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif on Wednesday surprised his supporters and onlookers when he suddenly left his costly jeep and hired an auto-rickshaw during a rally to avoid traffic mess on Ferozepur road.
He was electioneering and was getting late for a public meeting.
Earlier, he took a round of various Lahore constituencies and addressed a couple of public meetings there.
The largest gathering was held at Gulshan-i-Ravi (NA-121) where he talked of expensive election campaign the rival Tehreek-i-Insaf was running on electronic media.
“The people are flabbergasted by the expensive PTI election campaign as the party is spending on the electronic media more than all others’ combined spending on their respective drives,” the PML-N leader said who is also contesting from National Assembly constituency NA-129 and two Punjab Assembly constituencies -- PP-159, PP-161-- of Lahore.
Referring to Imran Khan’s comments that the actual contest was between ‘noon’ (PML-N) and ‘Junoon’ (craze, a reference to PTI activists), Shahbaz said seeing the huge amounts of dollars and pounds being spent by the PTI, it seemed the match was between ‘noon’ and ‘Qaroon’ (a dirty rich character of ancient times). He added the masses knew who this Qaroon was and why he had opened his coffers for a particular party.
Continuing his diatribe against the PTI chairman, he said the PPP had assigned the task of running its election campaign in Punjab to Imran Khan, who, he said, was daily issuing a pro-Zardari statement.
Shahbaz reiterated the allegation that Punjab was deprived of 700MW power daily on the orders of President Asif Zardari which was badly hurting industrial and agriculture sectors in the province.
He said, “Though we are Pakistani first and then Punjabi, country’s 65 per cent population lives in Punjab and any injustice to it is injustice to Pakistanis.” He wondered why the champions of change were mum at “this injustice”. “Do they not consider Punjab part of Pakistan?” he asked.
Speaking at a corner meeting at Jorray Pul, the former chief minister announced that after coming into power he would grant ownership rights to residents of kutchi abadis of Harbansepura.
Meanwhile, Shahbaz could not attend two public meetings – one at Chungi Amarsaddu and the other at Moon Market of Iqbal Town – because of the traffic mess on Ferozepur Road caused by the rally.