Neither India nor the United States were behind Pakistan’s miseries, the country’s former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said on Tuesday, candidly admitting that the cash-strapped nation shot itself in the foot. At the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) event in Lahore, the 73-year-old party supremo, for the second time in recent weeks, pointed out that he was ousted from power three times.
“Today where Pakistan has reached (poor economic state) this is not done by India, the US or even Afghanistan. We shot ourselves in our own foot…they (military) imposed a selected (government) on this nation by rigging the 2018 polls that led to the sufferings of the people and downfall of the economy,” Sharif was quoted as saying by PTI.
The three-time prime minister, who is eying his fourth term, slammed the judges for legitimising military dictators. “The judges garland them (dictators) and legitimise their rule when they break the Constitution. When it comes to a prime minister the judges stamp his ouster. The judges also approve the act of dissolution of the parliament…why?” he asked.
Nawaz also rebuked former Pakistan spy chief Gen Faiz Hamid for his role in ousting him from power in 2017. “A case has been opened in the Supreme Court against those (Faiz Hamid and others) who had said that if Nawaz came out of jail their two-year hard work would be wasted,” he said. The PML-N leader, who returned to the country from London in October ending a four-year-long self-imposed exile, is the only Pakistani politician who became the prime minister of the coup-prone country for a record three times.
“I was prime minister in the morning and in the evening I was declared a hijacker (1999). Similarly in 2017, I was ousted from power for not taking salary from my son,” Nawaz said. “They (military establishment) made this decision as they wanted to bring their selected man into power,” he said, referring to his arch-rival Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf: supremo Imran Khan.
(With agency inputs)
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