LONDON: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) activists have come together to call on Prime Minister Imran Khan to end what they say is the campaign of “intimidation and persecution” of opposition leaders.
The noisy protest was jointly held here after the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) arrested Asif Ali Zardari, Hamza Shahbaz Sharif and Faryal Talpur on Friday.
The participants of the protest raised slogans against the PTI government and alleged the arrests were made on behest of Prime Minister Imran Khan. They accused the government of using the NAB as its arm to damage opposition leaders while protecting the “real corruption of Imran Khan himself, his sister Aleema Khan and rest of the PTI leaders”.
They called on the PTI government to tender resignation for failing the people of Pakistan in nearly 10 months of government, for out-of-control prices and the political and economic chaos in the country. The protest continued for about three hours.
At the end of the protest, a petition was handed over to Pakistan’s High Commission reminding the country that PPP and PML-N have toiled for relentlessly for the preservation of democracy in Pakistan.
The petition said the government’s budget was being totally biased towards IMF’s agenda and a destructive device for Pakistan’s financial future. The petition said criticised “the contrived and strategic barricading of our respective political parties’ leaders that posed a danger to the presiding government’s destructive agendas for our beloved country. Mr Asif Ali Zardari, Mr Nawaz Sharif and Mr Hamza Shabaz Sharif.”
The petition said National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser was biased who reserved the discretionary right to award production notices to “our respectable leaders but refrained from allotting the same, especially in the wake of the passing of the budgetary proposals in Parliament, since the presiding government feared fierce opposition from them”.
The protesters said the PTI government had used NAB to arrest the opposition leaders to divert attention of the public from the injustice the government had imposed on people through the IMF budget and failure of the PTI government.