The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party’s deputy leader, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, has advocated for national reconciliation and national consensus to achieve political stability in the cash-strapped country amid tensions between his party and the ruling coalition.
Qureshi, the two-time former foreign minister, also demanded a meeting with party founder Imran Khan, who is lodged in Adiala Jail, so that he could present his point of view towards national reconciliation and national consensus, Dawn newspaper reported.
Both Khan and Qureshi are currently detained in jail.
Qureshi, 68, was arrested in August last year under the Official Secrets Act for violating the secrecy of the official cable sent by the Pakistani embassy in the US to the foreign office when he was the foreign minister. Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered his release from jail. However, he was re-arrested in December 2023 in another case.
Talking to the media after his appearance in an anti-terrorism court in Lahore on Saturday, Qureshi hoped that politically astute people in all parties would play a role in a national dialogue since a ban on his party would only complicate the situation.
The remarks by the vice chairman of PTI came amid reports that the government had purportedly been deliberating a ban on the party and a governor’s rule in the PTI-run Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province following violent clashes in Islamabad between security personnel and Imran Khan’s supporters last week demanding his release.
Khan’s party members crossed barricades and attempted to reach high-security D-Chowk in Islamabad, where a midnight crackdown resulted in four deaths and over 50 injuries.
Qureshi cautioned that crushing his party would not be in the interest of Pakistan and that the purported plan to impose the governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was sheer absurdity.
He said political leadership had no idea about the consequences of such a decision.
Qureshi said the federal government’s consideration to impose the governor’s rule in KP would be tantamount to desecrating the will of the people that gave a “two-thirds majority” to his party.
“I do hope that the politically savvy people in the PML-N will oppose the idea of imposing the governor’s rule and warn their leadership that it will be a political and historical blunder,” Qureshi said.
Referring to the tabling of a resolution in the Punjab Assembly seeking to ban his party, Qureshi thanked President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party for opposing the resolution. He also thanked different political parties, including the JUI-F, the Jamaat-i-Islami, and the Balochistan National Party (BNP-Mengal) for opposing a similar resolution in the Balochistan Assembly.
Qureshi reiterated that imposing the governor’s rule and proscribing PTI would hurt the federation.
“Can the government attain economic stability without political stability or achieve IMF (funding),” he asked while addressing Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb.
“You can attain stability through authoritarian rule but it will not be sustainable. You can get desired results through election engineering but will fail to get legitimacy,” Qureshi cautioned the people at the helm of affairs.
Martin Raiser, the World Bank’s Regional Vice-President for South Asia, recently said that Pakistan’s economy is stuck in a low-growth trap with poor human development outcomes and increasing poverty.
