Nawaz denies plans to meet Zardari

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif said on Monday that he did not know who was arranging his meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and for what purpose, and news regarding any such meeting was not correct. He told workers and reporters at Quaid-e-Azam International Airport after arriving in Karachi that he did not come to the city to meet the president but to hold a meeting with the party’s Karachi zonal council. He said he would support democracy and strengthen it because if democracy had seen continuity in Pakistan, the situation would be very different. He said India developed because of democracy and Pakistan lagged behind.
Nawaz said the government must take bold decisions to come out of crises. “I told Zardari the Charter of Democracy was signed by Benazir Bhutto and it must be honoured. We presented a complete framework but it was not implemented,” he said. Later, when Nawaz was speaking to party workers at the meeting of the council, slogans of ‘Go Zardari Go’ were raised, which he stopped. Nawaz said during his tenure, the country was on the path of development. After the motorway, his government wanted to build a bullet train rail from Karachi to Peshawar, but it was toppled. Criticising Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan, Nawaz said PTI was where the cantonment team of former president Pervez Musharraf had manage to gather.
He said load shedding must be eliminated from the country and poverty should also be eliminated. “Every institution including the army should be used with the guideline of the government,” he said. He promised that his government would eliminate load shedding and he was in favour of new provinces on an administrative basis, not linguistic. He said his party was also supporting a Hazara province but opposed any new province within Sindh on the basis of language. During the council session, Syed Ghous Ali Shah was elected president of PML-N Sindh while Saleem Zia was elected general secretary of the party. However, the party structure of the Sindh chapter could not be completed as the president and general secretary were announced but other posts of the party could not be filled. Leaders from various districts of the province became angry because of this and walked out from meeting in protest, declaring that they did not accept Shah as the president of the Sindh chapter.