LAHORE, Feb 26: Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi says people have rejected opposition’s call for a rally from Nasser Bagh as a result of which the religious alliance and the co-sponsors of the protest move stand exposed.
“People understood that the call was politically-motivated, and thus they did not respond,” he said while talking to Dawn on Sunday.
The chief minister said elements behind the call had tried to exploit religious sentiments of people for political gains, but they had miserably failed.
According to him, only 25 people were with Imran Khan, who were taken into custody for a while and then set free.
PML-N MNAs Pervaiz Malik and Sardar Ayyaz Sadiq, he said, were taken into custody and then served with refreshments at the DIG’s office. The police, he said, were under instructions not to let the two leaders go home unless they took the pastries and other eatables he had sent for them. As soon as they finished their cups of tea, he said, they were allowed to go home.
The chief minister did not have the exact number of those arrested by the police. However, he said they were ‘negligible’ in number.
He said those under arrest would be proceeded against in accordance with the law. But, he indicated that anti-terrorism law would not be invoked against them.
“In Sindh, the chief minister himself led a rally on the subject of blasphemous cartoons, but in Punjab you disallowed the protesters to express their sentiment. Why this contradiction in the attitude of two chief ministers?” he was asked.
Pervaiz Elahi said in Sindh the rally was quite peaceful, but in Punjab the protesters had resorted to violence on Feb 14, causing a huge damage to the private and public property.
In the light of the Feb 14 experience, he said, the government could not trust the opposition any more, and it was for this reason that it did not allow them to hold a rally on The Mall.
The chief minister made it clear that rallies on The Mall had not been allowed over the past three years, and the ban would remain in force for all times to come. He said there were many important government buildings on The Mall whose security could not be put on risk by allowing protests there.
He said if opposition parties had any issue to protest against, they were free to go to Minar-i-Pakistan. He said the government would not let anyone disrupt the economic activity. He said at a time when foreign investment was coming in and more and more people wanted to set up projects in Pakistan, political parties could not be allowed to vitiate the atmosphere.
He said Telenor and KFC were being run by Pakistanis because of which the protesters were left with no justification to damage them.
The chief minister said people were happy that the rally on The Mall had been disallowed.
He said the Jamaat-i-Islami had consistently claimed that it had a large number of followers in various European countries. If the party was right in its claim, why it did not ask its supporters in the western countries to take to street on the issue of cartoons.
He said if the Jamaat supporters were required to follow the laws of countries they were working in, they should also respect the laws of Pakistan.
The chief minister did not agree with the suggestion that deployment of police and the Rangers had caused inconvenience to the people on Sunday.