Daily Times

Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Monday said that Prime Minister Imran Khan had launched the anti-corruption app called Report Corruption and he should apply this app on all his cabinet members.

Talking to the media outside the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad, he said that the prime minister launched an app to identify corrupt individuals but the government’s app had been unable to identify the corrupt people in the PM’s cabinet.

Bilawal said that the governor’s rule in Sindh was the government’s dream and many predictions had been made, but the PPP was still ruling the province.

The PPP chairman went on to say that the public didn’t want to watch a puppet show, adding that Imran Khan had made a compromise to save his government by allowing former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif to travel abroad and now he (Imran Khan) was saying he won’t leave the former PM.

He said, “Nawaz Sharif went abroad despite being sentenced, while former president and PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari is inside prison without being indicted.”

He said that his father and aunt Faryal Talpur would be granted bail in the fake bank accounts case. He hoped that Zardari would get justice on December 11, the day the Islamabad High Court takes up his bail plea filed on medical grounds. He said Zardari’s medical report would be presented in the court and his father would hopefully be shifted to a hospital in Karachi. He said that the former president told him that the medical board has done his check-up.

He further said that the incompetent and selected PM could not resolve the issues of the general public, and efforts being made to keep political opponents under pressure.

“The selected government’s tactics to pressurise us are continuing, but we will not relinquish our struggle against them,” the PPP chairman said.

He reiterated that this year on his mother Benazir Bhutto’s death anniversary, a gathering would take place at Liaquat Bagh, where he said that the ‘selected government’ would be called out.

Message

Meanwhile, in his message on the eve of Human Rights Day, Bilawal stressed the importance of the state honouring its contract to its citizens and upholding the human rights of every citizen regardless of gender, creed, caste or ethnicity. He went on to say that any dereliction of this duty by the state would be a deviation from the founding principles of Pakistan and would be tantamount to a betrayal of the ethos of Pakistan.

Bilawal, who also is chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Human Rights, said that human rights violations were increasing in Pakistan since the installation of the federal government.

“The PTI government has overseen a campaign of repression of fundamental rights, from freedom of the press to freedom of association.” He went on to say that the Punjab government’s recent actions of filing FIRs against student leaders and the father of Mashal Khan for sedition were a damning indictment of the federal governments claims of being the state of Madina. “Freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief, women and children’s rights and protection of vulnerable segments has to be ensured for a peaceful and progressive society,” he added. The PPP chairman also stated that the economic policies being followed by the government were infringing on the dignity and right to live of the less-privileged segments and were contributing to the further marginalisation and erasure of the poor.

Bilawal said that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto led a struggle for the protection of the nation’s democratic and human rights, and they laid down their lives for this cause.