KARACHI: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Saturday said Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) candidate for Leader of the Opposition in Senate, Azam Nazeer Tarar, was a “controversial” choice.
The PPP chairman was speaking at a press conference in Karachi after PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz’s media briefing, wherein she had publicly criticised PPP for sacrificing everything for a “minor, inconsequential office.”
“How do you expect, given that we have the majority in the Senate, that I ask my party members to make PML-N’s Azam Leader of the Opposition and not Yousaf Raza Gillani?” the PPP chairman asked in his response to her remarks.
Bilawal said it was a parliamentary tradition and a historic fact that the single opposition party in the Senate had the right to get its candidate elected as Leader of the Opposition.
“Everyone had aspired for Yousuf Raza Gillani to be the Senate chairman. There should have been no reservations in him getting elected as the Leader of the Opposition,” he said.
While responding to a question regarding the critical role of four votes from the Balochistan Awami Party in this regard, Bilawal said we all should know how difficult it was to get the former prime minister elected as a senator from the National Assembly. “The victory of Gillani on March 3 was a historical one,” he said adding it was the first defeat of the “selected regime” at the hands of the Opposition.
In response to a question, the PPP leader said that he hopes to see the opposition’s alliance united as he had laid its foundation, adding that he knows how to use his coined term ‘selected’.
Bilawal hinted about issues within the PML-N, which had them to take up issues with the PPP, and said that the party would continue its struggle against the election of Senate chairman. “Our struggle against the Senate chairman election will continue and we will use our legal right. We will request for a judicial review against [the IHC court] verdict,” he said. “We are of the view that the presiding officer gave a biased and controversial decision and the post was snatched from him illegally.”
Talking about the recently-promulgated State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) ordinance, Bilawal termed it “illegal and an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty.” He said that the PPP intends the central bank to be independent and wants it to make decisions that are in the interest of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan. “The ordinance doesn’t make the SBP independent, but it makes it independent from Pakistan’s law and parliamentary and judicial oversight,” he added.
He demanded the government to withdraw the ordinance.
Commenting on SAPM Babar Nadeem’s resignation, the PPP chairman said that the government made him “a scapegoat” in the petrol fiasco, whereas it was the whole federal cabinet that needed to be blamed as decisions were made by all of them. “We demand that all those ministers who were part of the decision-making process step down.”
He said that was “a historical scandal” and we will not accept this robbery.
Once again PPP has stabbed us on our backs. Never trust these people.