By Staff Reporter
MIRPUR: Nawaz Sharif’s coalition partner has accused his party of political bribery, after the former prime minister used the final hours of campaigning in Azad Kashmir to hand out gifts of electric buses and take a pointed swipe at the Pakistan Peoples Party’s chairman.
The row erupted after Sharif, addressing a rally in the lakeside city of Mirpur alongside his daughter, Punjab chief minister Maryam Nawaz, turned to Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari for the first time in his campaign in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). “This is Kashmir, not Kashmore, and this is Mirpur, not Mirpurkhas,” he told the crowd, drawing a comparison with two Sindh districts long run by the PPP, before addressing the party chairman directly: “Don’t take this the wrong way, Bilawal bhai. You are like a son to me.”
The remark, meant as banter, did not land that way with the PPP. Sindh’s information minister, Sharjeel Inam Memon, said the comment mocked the province and its people, and should not have been made under any circumstances, calling it not just frivolous but ridiculous.
The bigger flashpoint, though, was money. During the same rally, Maryam Nawaz confirmed that a PML-N government in AJK would supply ten modern electric buses for Mirpur, on top of ten mobile “Hospitals on Wheels,” gifts her father had trailed earlier in the day. PPP-Parliamentarians secretary general Nayyar Bukhari accused the party leadership of handing over buses bearing Nawaz’s own image, and called it political bribery, urging the chief election commissioner to take immediate notice of the transfer. Several PPP candidates for the AJK Assembly, including Sardar Javed Ayub, Sardar Mukhtar Abbasi and Syed Bazil Ali Naqvi, also objected.
AJK Legislative Assembly speaker and PPP candidate Chaudhry Latif Akbar went further still, alleging that the string of promises made across PML-N rallies breached the election code of conduct, and calling on the Election Commission to intervene. He accused the party leadership of trying to buy Kashmiri votes, and dismissed an earlier, lighter remark by Sharif — a joke that he would ask Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to install the PML-N’s nominee as AJK’s next premier — by noting drily that Nawaz Sharif’s own brother had never made him prime minister, yet he had come to complain about the position anyway.
The pledges themselves
Setting the row aside, the rally was billed as the PML-N’s closing pitch to a region both Sharifs described in deeply personal terms. Sharif called AJK his first home rather than a second one, and pressed the point that no government since his own removal from office had done anything meaningful for its people, asking directly what his successors had achieved. Maryam Nawaz, who has said both her paternal and maternal grandparents were Kashmiri, described herself as a daughter of Kashmir by heart despite criticism from opponents, and said Mirpur’s roads were in poor condition and deserved better given the region’s contribution to Pakistan.
Sharif set out what he called the PML-N’s manifesto for the region: new schools, colleges and hospitals fitted with CT scanners and MRI machines, so residents no longer need to travel to Pakistan for treatment, plus a laptop for every deserving student. On infrastructure, he promised to dualise the Kotli-Nakyal road, build tunnels at Lohar Gali and in the Leepa Valley, revive the long-stalled Mansehra-Muzaffarabad-Mirpur motorway along the Jhelum River, and seek an international airport for Mirpur from Shehbaz Sharif directly. He said he would personally oversee delivery of the region’s major projects, and challenged opponents to name a government that had done more.
Maryam Nawaz argued that AJK’s problems were never a shortage of resources but weak infrastructure and thin welfare provision, reminding the crowd who had built the Kohala-Muzaffarabad and Murree-Kohala roads and the region’s cardiac hospitals — prompting chants of her father’s name. She pledged that welfare schemes already running in Punjab, including free medicines delivered to households, ration cards and social protection programmes, would be extended to AJK immediately if the party wins, and said voters would see a clean Azad Kashmir once the election was behind them.
Polling for the AJK Legislative Assembly runs in three phases, according to the territory’s chief election commissioner, Ghulam Mustafa Mughal: Mirpur division votes first on July 27, followed by Muzaffarabad division on August 2 and Poonch division on August 10.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
