Daily Times

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif on Thursday prohibited all PML-N members from meeting any representative of the military or related agencies in the future without informing the party leadership.

“Current events show that certain meetings are kept secret,” Nawaz tweeted on Thursday, while reacting to reports of PML-N member Mohammad Zubair’s meeting with army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa recently. “How other meetings are made public to give off a certain impression,” he said. “This game should stop now,” tweeted the former prime minister. “Today, I am issuing directives to my organisation: No member of our party will meet any representative of the military and related agencies,” he added.

Nawaz said that if any such meeting was found to be necessary, it will take place only after the party leadership’s approval and it be put on the public record. “If the meeting is indeed necessary, it will not be kept secret,” added the former prime minister.

Nawaz’s tweet comes a day after the Pakistan Army disclosed that senior PML-N leader and former Sindh governor Zubair had twice reached out to Chief of Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and discussed political and legal woes of Nawaz and his daughter Maryam Nawaz in the past few weeks. “Mr Zubair twice met the army chief, once in the last week of August and then on September 7 in the presence of director general ISI,” military spokesman Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar had revealed in a TV talk show on Wednesday. He said both meetings were held on Zubair’s request.

“recent events once again prove how some meetings remain hidden behind seven veils while others are given the colour of choice through publicising them,” Nawaz said.

Wednesday’s disclosure by the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) came just hours after PML-N’s senior vice-president and former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi told a news conference in Lahore that none of the party members had held one-on-one meeting with the army chief in the recent past. This was the second time this week that opposition leaders’ secret contacts with the military leadership were made public. The disclosures followed Nawaz’s hard-hitting speech at the opposition’s September 20 multiparty conference in which he had lashed out at the army, saying there was “a state above the state in the country” and the conference’s communique calling for an end to “establishment’s interference in politics” and “no role of armed forces and intelligence agencies” in future elections.

Federal Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed had also revealed that major opposition figures, including Shehbaz Sharif, Khawaja Asif and Ahsan Iqbal, had met the COAS and the DG ISI in recent days.