Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Senior Vice President Fawad Chaudhry said that the no-confidence motion against party chief Imran Khan was actually Tehreek-e-Insaf versus the army. Otherwise, stable governments are not toppled the way the PTI government was toppled.
Khan was removed from the prime ministership in April last year by a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly by the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), an alliance of 13 political parties led by JUI-F chief Fazlur Rehman.
Speaking on BBC program ‘Hard Talk’, Fawad said that everyone knows who controlled these coalition parties and from whom they are taking instructions.
He asserted that everyone knows that political parties are controlled by the establishment. However, he said politics should have been left to politicians alone. Fawad said that according to Imran Khan, General (Rtd) Qamar Javed Bajwa was involved in bringing down the PTI government.
Fawad Chaudhry said that political crisis leads to economic crisis. He said that the economic crisis was created by sending Imran Khan’s government home unnecessarily.
Responding to a question that the economic crisis faced by the current government is actually the legacy of the PTI government, Fawad claimed that the country was in a state of disaster when the PTI formed the government and the country’s rate of growth during the PTI regime. Growth had reached 6 percent, and that happened despite the Covid pandemic.
He said that Pakistan’s economic crisis has arisen from the unconstitutional removal of Imran Khan’s government.
The host of the program, Stephen Sekar, said that when the PTI took power in 2018, Pakistan’s debt was $116 billion, but when the party left the government, it increased to $230 billion. Fawad replied that his party’s government had to borrow funds to pay back the debts owed to the previous government. He said that his party’s government worked to restructure the debt and did the same as far as the economy was concerned. He said that Zardari and Sharifs have put Pakistan in debt cycle.
Sakur said the data did not prove his claim, referring to the PTI’s pre-election promises, particularly on corruption, saying that Pakistan in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 20 points dropped. Fawad disagreed, saying that it was departments concerned with the rule of law, for example the judiciary, and not political parties, that contributed to the index. He said that Imran Khan gave the country a clean government in its 75-year history.
The PTI leader said that economic stability is not possible without political stability because [the political uncertainty in the country is such that] no one knows who will rule the country three or five months from now.
Fawad Chaudhry said that the Pakistani ambassador to America sent a cipher after meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lowe and Imran Khan presented the same cipher. He said that the American official had said in the cipher that Pakistan-US relations would depend on the success or failure of the no-confidence motion.
He said that the PTI government had sent a letter to the President Dr. Arif Alvi and requested him to conduct a judicial inquiry into the matter.
“PTI has never said it wants war with the US. Instead, it wants good bilateral relations. No party wants a confrontation with the US,” noted Fawad. However, at the same time, PTI does not want any country, including the US, to dictate Pakistan.
Saying that has passed, Fawad said his party is looking forward to good relations with the US, and hopes that the superpower will also want to cooperate with Pakistan’s most popular political party.
Imran Khan never called Osama bin Laden a martyr, Fawad said it was just a slip of the tongue, which was clarified by the party. He said that PTI improved the old relations with the US after taking over the government.
“The PTI government influenced the Taliban to allow the evacuation of millions of foreigners trapped in Afghanistan,” he said.
The PTI leader also commented on the current situation with the Afghan government and said that the current government in Islamabad has ruined PTI’s efforts in this regard, as they have not continued Imran Khan’s Afghanistan policy. . “The PTI government was on the way to resolve the issue through dialogue with the Taliban government in Afghanistan,” he said.
He said that PTI can wait for general elections but the government is not in a mood to hold them. He said that he also does not want local elections in the federal capital because the present rulers know that whenever elections are held, people will throw them out.
He said that Pakistan needs elections. He further said that we want the elections to be held as soon as possible in the country so that there is stability in the country and people’s problems are solved.
