Information minister rejects demand
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has decided to address the nation on the state-owned TV at 6:00pm on April 10, and for this his party has asked the acting MD PTV to hurriedly make necessary arrangements.
However, in his sharp reaction, Information and Broadcasting Minister Senator Pervaiz Rashid described Imran’s demand to address the nation on the state-run TV as a political move and rejected it out right.
The minister asserted that the president and prime minister only enjoyed the right to address the nation on the state-owned TV and said that if Imran was to be allowed deliver speech on it, then an MNA, who has only one seat in the National Assembly, would tomorrow make a similar demand.
He maintained that the state-owned TV telecasts proceedings of the Senate and the National Assembly after permission of the Senate chairman and NA speaker. “The opposition gets as much as does the government on PTV,” he claimed.
PTI’s Central Information Secretary Naeemul Haq, who managed a day earlier, to use the facility of the Ministry of Information i.e. the Press Information Department (PID) to take the government to task during a media conference, which is the first at the facility by an opposition party, Friday wrote letter to the acting MD of the state-run TV.
He informed the top official of the TV that some federal cabinet members mounted totally misleading propaganda on the leading charity institution, Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and targeted the charity entity.
Naeem contended that through the state-run TV, this misleading propaganda was repeatedly aired. The PTI chief spokesman pointed out to him that PTV was an organisation run by the taxes of masses, which could not be used for projection of an individual or a family, being a national asset.
“Every citizen has as much right on PTV as much as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, ministers belonging to his party and his family members,” he went on to maintain. Naeemul Haq alleged that by using the state-run TV, the PML-N ministers propagated distorted information on Panama Leaks. “In order to put the things in their true perspective, arrangements for Imran’s address to the nation should be completed,” he emphasised.
Meanwhile, reacting to PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s statement that Khursheed Shah was the Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly and not Imran, questioning his demand to address the nation on PTV, Naeemul Haq asked whether Bilawal’s vision was confined just to the National Assembly.
He said Khursheed Shah correctly was opposition leader but Imran was the most popular opposition leader and hence had the right to address the nation. Naeemul Haq strongly condemned alleged harassment of PTI workers by the Islamabad administration and the police. He asked both to change their approach.