Daily Times

PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz on Tuesday dared Imran Khan to name ‘X, Y, and Z’, which he often refers to during his speeches.

“How does challenging them in the daylight and then kissing their feet in the night work?” Maryam questioned while talking to media in Islamabad. She said the PTI chairman must have the “moral courage to come clean about who he had been secretly meeting in the dark of the night.”

On the accusation of threatening phone calls, Maryam said Khan, who used to have his trolls harass others over the phone, was now getting a taste of his own medicine. “We also received such threatening calls ourselves, but our revolution did not die out in two months.”

She said Imran Khan, who had accused the US of co-conspiring to overthrow his government, was now “lobbying with the Americans to get himself a political bailout”. “Today, he is trying to convince the US to broker a normalisation deal between him (Khan) and them (the establishment),” she said.

The PML-N vice president went on to say that Khan was not happy over his party leaders’ ongoing engagements with the establishment. “We have given the names as well as the proof.”

She said her father and the party supremo Nawaz Sharif would soon return to Pakistan and would be cleared in the illegal cases he was facing for crimes never committed. “Khan is not the blue-eyed boy. They are just using him and he is saying if he doesn’t get an army chief of his choice, then he is going to smear their faces,” she said while resuming her flak.

Maryam, while terming Imran Khan a ‘non-issue’, called upon the political parties to concentrate on the country’s development, progress and prosperity. “Imran Khan is a non-issue now, and we should not give him any weightage and rather put our collective efforts towards resolving the country’s issues,” she said.

To a question, Mariam claimed that the government in Punjab was unconstitutional and Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi had to go home sooner or later for the betterment of the province.

The PML-N leader lambasted Imran Khan for ‘maligning’ state institutions and alleged that he and his coterie were fully involved in corruption, while the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had failed to produce any evidence in the cases registered against the PML-N leadership, including herself.