Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan on Monday hit back at Nawaz Sharif a day after the PML-N head and his daughter Maryam lashed out at the cricketer-turned-politician and criticised the PTI’s governance of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

Nawaz, taking the stage at the PML-N ‘power show’ in Peshawar on Sunday, had appealed to the city’s people to elect his party with an overwhelming majority in the general election, adding that this would allow the party to make “laws to stop disqualification of an elected prime minister in future”.

The father-daughter Sharif duo were heavily critical of Khan and his party’s work in PTI-governed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), slamming the cricketer-turned-politician for “spending four years sitting on containers” ? a reference to his repeated threats of agitation following the 2014 dharna in Islamabad ? and questioning what he had done for the province.

In response to the Sharifs’ criticism, Khan clapped back on Twitter saying: “According to Nawaz Sharif’s notion of democracy, the elected prime minister can abuse all state institutions, storm [the] Supreme Court with his party hoodlums, give judges briefcases full of money – with no questions asked and no law applied because an elected prime minister is above the law of the land.”

“Yesterday Nawaz Sharif made clear his idea of democracy and of a PM heading a democratic govt was where the PM is above the law of the land after being elected.

He can money launder, evade taxes, conceal assets, lie before parl – all corruption is permissable coz PM is elected!” Khan tweeted.

Khan also denied Sharif’s claims of lack of development in KP, claiming that work on 350 micro-hydropower stations had been completed in KP, whereas police, health and education reforms had also been undertaken.

He added that the PTI’s Billion Tree Tsunami programme ? which has come under the microscope after allegations of mismanagement of funds ? was audited by the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), whereas the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had also acknowledged its success.

“Such ignorance on part of Nawaz Sharif is shameful,” Khan concluded, responding to Sharif’s claims that billions of rupees had been misappropriated in the name of planting a billion trees.

Published in Daily Times, February 6^th 2018.