Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Minister of Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry has said on Monday that the government does not expect the Indian leadership to respond positively to Pakistan’s desire of talks to resolve bilateral issues.

During an exclusive interview with a newspaper, the minister said that the upcoming election in India and Indian Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s anti-Pakistan stance were the reasons behind the government’s low expectations to immediately resolve the issues with its neighbour.

“The reason behind the differences with the US was its plan to give a role to India in Afghanistan while Islamabad and Washington were in agreement that the US should leave a stable Afghanistan,” Chaudhry added.

Furthermore, the federal minister said that the stability of Afghanistan is important for Pakistan and the nation has already suffered a lot.

He informed that a white-paper on power outage and corruption would shortly be issued to prove the previous government’s claims, of ending load-shedding, wrong.

When asked about the government’s much-talked programme of giving 10 million jobs and five million houses, the minister said that the PM Imran Khan has decided to take briefing twice in a month on progress on the first 100-day programme of the government.

Also read Streamlining Indo-Pak relations

“It would not be difficult to achieve the targets, as the GDP growth would be increased to 6.4 percent,” he claimed.

Chaudhry further told the newspaper that the PM had directed the army chief that the right to carry the gun should be with the state and not with any banned outfit or private force.

Those who would not stick to this would face elimination, and no outfit, even the one which might have sided with the government, would not be allowed to resort to violence or carry the gun, he added.

He informed that the PM would soon announce a plan for the overseas Pakistanis to invest in Pakistan and in return they would be offered facilities and concessions.