Turncoats must be barred from election: JI

LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami Secretary General Liaqat Baloch demanded that politicians who were changing their parties in a bid to hide their corruption and escape accountability be debarred from contesting elections at least for once.

He was addressing the participants of JI central workshop at Mansoora on Tuesday. Liaqat Baloch said JI would gather national leadership at a round-table conference and propose a common line of action to remove the drawbacks in the electoral system. He said secular parties’ designs to make the country a secular and liberal state would be foiled through unity of the religious parties. He said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was giving threats to the state institutions to escape accountability. However, he said, the prime minister should understand that times had changed and the masses would not tolerate any attack on the judiciary or any similar action.

He said corruption and abuse of the official authority had pushed the country to the brink of disaster. He said that the rulers were now on their way out and nobody would save them from a terrible fate. He said that any unconstitutional move would not be supported either by the armed forces, the parliament or the masses.

Liaqat Baloch said the US was encouraging India and Israel, and the US conspiracies could plunge the region into a grave crisis. In such a situation, he said, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia could jointly find a way out from the US terrorism, and find solutions to the Ummah’s problems. He said the constitution declared the Quran and the Sunnah as the supreme law of the land and nobody could dare to change this.     

Earlier, Liaqat baloch visited General Hospital and inquired after those injured in the suicide bombing of Monday. Talking to the media on the occasion, he said entire nation was on the same page against terrorism. He said the acts of terrorism were being managed by India from Afghanistan soil. He said India was targeting the country’s masses and institutions.

Motion: PTI has questioned the functioning of Safe City Project which was initiated with the cost of billions of rupees. Through an adjournment motion submitted in the Punjab Assembly Secretariat, Shoaib Siddiqi, PTI MPA, said the recent suicide attack had exposed the Safe City Project under which cameras and other material worth billions of rupees were installed in the city. He stated that the attack near Arfa Karim Tower was highly condemnable and raised many questions on Safe City Project.