K-P warns centre against ‘adventurism’

Ministers say action against CM will not be acceptable; only president can impose emergency, not PM

PESHAWAR:

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) has warned the federal government against any adventurism, saying that any action against Chief Minister Mahmood Khan or barring police or bureaucracy from cooperating with the provincial government would lead to legal and constitutional response.

Addressing a press conference in Peshawar on Friday, Special Assistant to CM on Information Barrister Muhammad Ali Saif, Education Minister Kamran Bangash and Finance Minister Taimur Saleem Jhagra said that the prime minister has no legal authority to impose emergency in the province as it can be done by the president only.

They said that Imran Khan ended the long march because he didn’t want a clash with the government organizations and there was no deal involved.

“The Azadi March was peaceful and it is our constitutional right to protest but brutal state power was used to suppress it,” they observed, adding that depriving the overseas Pakistanis of their right to vote is another blunder as over nine million expatriates are involved.

They said that amending the NAB laws indicated that the government was in a constant state of fear.

“A petrol bomb has been used against the people under the cover of darkness and the federal government has also reversed the higher education policy of the Imran Khan government,” they said, adding that the previous government provided Rs65 billion for the universities but the amount has been reduced to just Rs30 billion by the current government. This is unjust, they added.

“We demand that the higher education sector should not be ruined and that we will use all legal and constitutional channels to reverse the move,” they said.

“Whenever we linked inflation in Pakistan with the global inflation, everyone including Miftah Ismail criticized us but now his software has been updated and he is talking sense,” they said.

“These people have no idea whether or not they want elections. Why were overseas Pakistanis deprived of their right to vote? ANP and JUI-F are strangely silent on this issue,” they said.

“K-P has neither attacked nor sent an army against Islamabad. Protest is the basic right of every citizen under Article 15 of the Constitution,” said Barrister Saif, adding that if they used their right to protest then the state could not use power against it.

“They are not neat and clean either but still they are engaged in our character assassination. Supreme Court of Pakistan should give the right of vote to the overseas Pakistanis,” he said.

He recalled that Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah had said that the CM led an attack on Islamabad from K-P and that the federal government would consider all options in this regard. He said the federal government was looking for excuses to impose emergency in K-P and only the president had the power to do so who would not take such a step.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2022.