PM says Churchill inspired me to be ‘firm without being rough’

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Friday said his ‘soft but firm’ political temperament was based on an inspiration by great British statesman Winston Churchill.
Gilani quoted Churchill’s saying ‘One should be firm without being rough’ and said he adopted the same disposition that paid him dividends in the shape of a harmonious and amicable political atmosphere in the country. “It is my desire to be remembered as a person who shunned the politics of vengeance,” Gilani said while addressing the award-winning students of matric and intermediate at a function organised by the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. Gilani said he could proudly state that never in the country’s 65-year history, there had been a single political prisoner during his tenure as prime minister.
“I did not take revenge even from those who put me in jail for five years on giving jobs to the unemployed,” he said, and insisted that prisons sometimes prove as great reformatory cells. Quoting another of Churchill’s statement, ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind’, Gilani urged the students to follow the golden rule in their lives. “We want people to learn skills and get specialised knowledge to prove them as an asset for the nation,” he said.
He said, “Gone are the days when only idles joined politics in this country,” and said now it was the field of educated and learned people.