QUETTA: The Minister of State for Water and Power, Abid Sher Ali, said on Wednesday the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek had staged sit-ins in Islamabad under a conspiracy to drag the army, engaged in an anti-terrorist operation in North Waziristan, into a controversy.
But Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Army chief General Raheel Sharif had demonstrated wisdom and foiled the plot, he said at a press conference here on Wednesday.
He said another objective of the sit-in was to stop China from investing $34 billion in the country by creating chaotic conditions in Islamabad which led to the postponement of the Chinese president’s visit.
Through the sit-ins, he said, the PTI and the PAT wanted to create anarchy and cause bloodshed, but the prime minister and “patriotic political parties” in parliament had foiled their nefarious designs.
While the country was reeling from flood devastation and one million people had been displaced in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the KP chief minister was busy dancing at the sit-in, he added.
On the one hand, he said, PAT chief Allama Tahirul Qadri gave message to his “masters” that he was a man of peace whenever he delivered a speech in English and, on the other, he provoked the participants of the sit-in to resort to violence when he spoke in Urdu.
He congratulated his party’s workers when they attacked the Pakistan Television headquarters, but later said that the attackers did not belong to the PAT, the minister recalled.
He said Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain, Chaudhary Pervaiz Elahi and Sheikh Rasheed were members of the cabinet of former president Pervez Musharraf when veteran Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was assassinated and students of Lal Masjid were killed in Islamabad.
He said 40 per cent of the proposed Chinese investment was to be spent on projects in Balochistan, including Gadani power park.
