By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: Punjab’s information minister told the federal minister Chaudhry Salik Hussain on Wednesday to resign from government and sit in opposition if he believes the province is corruptly run, and he replied by accusing her of wrecking a private attempt to settle the quarrel.
Azma Bokhari said Salik, who holds the overseas Pakistanis portfolio in Shehbaz Sharif’s cabinet, could not allege graft in Maryam Nawaz’s administration while asking it for development money. She called it “hypocritical politics” and said his remarks suggested he had “lost his senses”. “How can someone keep singing the tune of corruption and, at the same time, demand funds?” she asked.
She said he was behaving less like a member of the influential Chaudhry family than like someone trading street-level insults, and that people who insulted women could hardly claim to uphold political decorum. She also noted that a week had passed without any reply to the defamation notice served on him by the chief minister. “If he cannot respond to the notice, he should resign from his ministerial positions and go home,” she said. Rana Sanaullah, the prime minister’s adviser on political affairs, said Salik’s remarks reflected the “bad company” he kept.
In an interview broadcast on a private news channel, Salik said Bokhari’s earlier attack had undone a mediation effort. He had explained the context of his remarks to the federal information minister, Attaullah Tarar, he said, but a Punjab minister “spoiled the matter” before it could be mended. Neither the prime minister nor any other senior PML-N figure had approached the PML-Q, he added.
He maintained he had not directly accused the chief minister of corruption, but said she had made “below the belt” remarks about his family. He would not retract anything, he said, because she had hurt his self-respect. “Maryam Nawaz should ask her father about our family,” he said.
The dispute began with a television interview that aired on 2 November, in which Salik said complaints of corruption in Punjab were commonplace and that a disproportionate share of the provincial development budget was being spent in Lahore. He also described Parvez Elahi, his cousin and a former chief minister, as the best the province had had. Salik and other relatives have said Gujrat has not seen the development it enjoyed under Elahi, who sided with Imran Khan’s PTI in 2022 while Salik’s party backed the Sharif-led government.
The chief minister responded on 3 November by sending a Rs5bn defamation notice. It demanded an unconditional apology, a retraction and damages, and went also to the programme’s host and the channel’s chairman. She told an audience in Attock that he should produce evidence or she would “drag you to court”, and asked why he stayed in a government he considered corrupt.
Bokhari initially said Salik’s anger was personal. She alleged it stemmed from the refusal of a request for a deputy commissioner of his choosing in Gujrat. Salik called that incorrect, saying the interview was recorded on 25 September and the new deputy commissioner was appointed on 31 October.
On Wednesday he said he would present evidence to the court when he replied to the notice, and that the PML-Q sat in government under an agreed arrangement at which Maryam had not been present. Whether the PML-N still needed its coalition partners, he said, was for the PML-N to decide. He also claimed the Punjab government had pulled Elite Force personnel from his Gujrat home and ordered them back to Police Lines. Reports of the claim carried no response from the provincial government.
The row has also reached the PML-N’s senior ranks. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said last week that the interview could be part of a wider scheme by some “carpetbaggers” to create an alternative political arrangement in Punjab by discrediting its government. The PML-Q holds two ministries in the ruling coalition. Salik’s elder brother, Shafay, sits in the Punjab cabinet, as minister for industries, commerce and investment, and has so far avoided any public criticism of the provincial administration.
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