Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday offered a peace overture to his predecessor and political rival Imran Khan, saying he could hold talks with him if he was facing “trouble” in jail.
Mr Khan, the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, has been in jail since August last year after being convicted in some of the nearly 200 cases leveled against him since the ouster of power in April 2022. The 71-year-old cricketer-turned-politician has been in jail since August 2022.
“If their (PTI) founder is facing trouble (in jail), I repeat: let’s sit and talk,” Sharif said while addressing the National Assembly.
He said, “Let us sit together to take the country forward. Let us talk for the betterment of the country. There is no other way to move forward.”
The Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf have been at loggerheads for several years, especially after the February 8 elections, which Khan’s party claims to have won.
Commenting on the 2018 elections won by Khan’s party PTI, Sharif said, “We entered Parliament despite rigged elections. The slogans raised during my maiden speech will always be remembered as a black chapter in history books.”
“If a person is facing injustice, I believe the scales of justice should be in favour of the victim, there is no difference – whether he is a politician or a person from any field,” Geo News quoted Sharif as saying.
Mr Sharif regretted that when he was in the opposition, he had once again proposed talks with Mr Khan but such slogans were raised again.
“So who is responsible for this bitterness (among politicians)? We don’t even shake hands now,” he said.
Sharif, 72, also spoke of his ordeal of facing harassment by the Khan government and said he was in jail when his mother died. He said despite suffering from cancer and spinal problems, he was taken to courts in normal prison vans, making his condition worse, but he never complained.
Responding to Prime Minister Sharif’s remarks, Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Omar Ayub reiterated that the PTI will talk to the government only if Mr Khan and other jailed leaders and activists are released from jail.
“This must be on your mind: You torture our workers, you have kept our women workers in prison vans at 45 degrees Celsius. My Prime Minister Imran Khan has been kept in a death cell, the atmosphere there is like a furnace,” she said amid sloganeering from the ruling party.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)