LAHORE: Chief Minister Punjab Shehbaz Sharif threw his weight behind senior Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, after the ex-interior minister’s tussle with fellow party leader Pervaiz Rasheed continued to deepen, it emerged.
Chief Minister Shehbaz, while speaking to a senior journalist, broke his silence on the issue making headlines for quite some time.
Shehbaz expressed that the PML-N president and his brother Nawaz Sharif should intervene and try to resolve the matter between the two party leaders.
The chief minister of Punjab said that Chaudhry Nisar is a senior leader and has been an aide to Nawaz since the 1980s and Pervaiz Rasheed should not have passed certain statements.
Director News local Tv channel Rana Jawad, in his analysis, said the rift between the two leaders is an important matter and Shehbaz has spoken up on the matter, asking Nawaz to resolve it.
He said that the complication in relations between the two leaders surfaced after the Dawnleaks issue.
The rift between Nisar and Rasheed seems to be deepening over time. Recently in reference to Dawn Leaks controversy in an interview, Rasheed said that the former interior minister passed “misleading statements about the party during testing times”.
The party should make a decision unanimously regarding Nisar, said Rasheed, adding that if his vote is required then he will suggest it.
Nisar, in a reaction to the criticism, said that he doesn’t seem it fit to respond to a man who is ‘barely in the party’.
“If the Dawn leaks report is made public then the deeds of the person passing statements will be in front of everyone,” said the former interior minister.
Earlier, then interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had held Rasheed’s ‘doings’ responsible for his ouster.
On October 29, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took back the Ministry of Information, Broadcasting and National Heritage from Pervaiz Rasheed, weeks after the military’s top commanders said a ‘false and fabricated’ newspaper report breached national security.
According to a statement from the PM’s office, the premier directed then Information Minister Pervaiz Rasheed to step down to enable holding of an independent and detailed inquiry into the episode.
The English-language daily, Dawn, had published a story on October 6 in which journalist Cyril Almeida had written about an alleged civil-military rift during the National Security Committee (NSC) meeting over the issue of tackling jihadi outfits.
