Tuesday, July 20, 2010

PML-N plans to increase pressure on PPP

LAHORE: The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has decided to seek ways and means for putting pressure on the PPP-led government on the fake degrees issue.

Seeing the PPP in panic, the PML-N suspects that efforts are afoot to conceal a `wrong’. For the purpose, a meeting of PML-N elders is being scheduled after the return of party chief Nawaz Sharif from London by the weekend.

“Yes, we are planning to hold a consultative meeting of senior party leaders to take stock of the overall political situation, fake degrees and the security conference (that had been proposed by Nawaz Sharif two weeks ago),” PML-N spokesman Ahsan Iqbal told Dawn on Monday.

The consultation would be held after the party chief’s return within four days, he added.

The fake degrees issue will provide the PML-N with a chance to repulse some of the pressure it has been facing from the PPP for the past couple of months as well as further eroding moral grounds its political rival is standing on.

“Common sense says there is something wrong because of which they (the PPP) have gone so much panicky,” said Ahsan when asked if the PML-N had done any calculations on fake degrees of parliamentarians from Sindh, the power base of the PPP.

“The way they are exerting pressure on Higher Education Commission Chairman Javed Leghari by arresting his brother Farooq Leghari in different cases shows that the PPP government wants to influence and delay the process of verification of degrees to conceal the facts.”

The PML-N on Sunday issued a statement on behalf of Nawaz Sharif condemning the government for allegedly victimising the HEC chairman.

SECURITY MOOT
As the PML-N is anxiously awaiting response on the anti-terror national conference proposed by its chief a couple of weeks ago, the PPP-led federal government seems to be in no hurry and has put the issue on the back burner as no preparations in this regard are being reported from any quarter.

In the wake of suicide attack on Hazrat Ali Hajveri’s shrine in Lahore, Nawaz had on July 3 suggested the government convene an all-party conference also inviting people from civil society, media and other walks of life to hammer out a unanimous strategy against terrorism.

Within hours, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani phoned the PML-N leader accepting his proposal, hinting at convening the moot in a week.

Nawaz then, through a letter, advised Gilani some steps before holding the security conference.

These included getting feedback from intelligence and security forces, asking all stakeholders to do homework before coming to the moot, evolving a plan of action beforehand and not devising a policy that was not going to be implemented.

Asked if the party would host the security moot, as hinted at by Nawaz while tabling the proposal, in case the government did not go for it, Ahsan said although they were ready to play the host, the federal government was in better position in this regard for it had the critical intelligence input required for framing a counter-strategy.

All attempts to contact federal information minister Qamar Zaman Kaira and PPP information secretary Fauzia Wahab to seek their comments failed.

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