Maryam chides PM for equating his office with jihad

LAHORE: PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz Sharif has chided Prime Minister Imran Khan for saying that he goes to office daily to wage jihad (against corruption).

“You wake up in the morning not to go for jihad (but) to rob the masses of their right. You go to snatch roti from the mouth of the poor and medicine from the ailing. You go to break the back of the people with electricity and gas bills. You go to oppress the victims. You go to get the people kidnapped in broad daylight and you call it jihad,” she said in a tweet in response to the PM’s statement in his address to the nation on Sunday.

In another tweet, the PML-N vice president said the claimant of the state of Medina had, perhaps, forgotten that had the real state of Medina existed, he would have reached his dreadful end. She asked if the prime minister had called the theft of flour, sugar, gas and vote, price-hike, his incompetence and ineptness jihad.

“There should be a fatwa (religious decree) against you for killing 22 karor (220m) people alive and terming it jihad (sic),” Maryam said in yet another tweet challenging PM Khan to come out of his 300-kanal Bani Gala palace to see how the poor people were cursing him.

She also used her Twitter account to refute Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid’s statement that had given the impression that she had sought removal of her name from the Exit Control List. The minister had told a press conference in the federal capital earlier in the day that PM Khan had categorically refused to remove Maryam’s name from the ECL.

“Who had asked them to remove (my) name (from the ECL)? If they are playing a drama to forcibly send me abroad then they should listen again carefully that not only I’m going nowhere and that thinking of submitting any request to this bogus and vote-thief whom I don’t accept as the prime minister, is a sin (sic),” she said.

“Keep your ECL and your permission (for removal of name from the list) to yourself. Rather keep it safe. For, you will be requiring this for yourself very soon, as your crimes are real.”

Further ‘correcting’ her statement in a later tweet, Maryam said: “Bogus ECL and bogus permission. The thieves of votes neither hold any place nor authority in anyone’s eyes.”

Shahbaz Gill, the special assistant to the PM, also took to social media to respond to the onslaught of Ms Nawaz.

“Another messenger of the NRO was told a no yesterday evening. And now, you see that the Twitter (account) of silent-mode-wali-Baji will switch on,” he said in a tweet. “Begging for NRO and offers for all kinds of cooperation at the backdoor but drama begins on refusal [to grant the NRO]. Baji, this story is old enough. Any new dupe, new deception?”

Criticising the repeated use of ‘you’ in her tweet in reaction to Imran Khan’s speech, Mr Gill said it proved that Nawaz Sharif not only failed as a prime minister but also failed in education (of his daughter).