By Staff Reporter
JHELUM: Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Punjab, challenged ministers who accuse her government of corruption to resign on Tuesday, saying political allegations have a limited “shelf life” and that voters in the end back those who serve them.
“Those who have a problem should resign. Why are they sitting there as ministers?” she said at a scholarship and laptop distribution ceremony at Government Comprehensive High School in Jhelum.
Nawaz named no one. Her remark was an apparent reference to Chaudhry Salik Hussain, the federal minister for overseas Pakistanis, whose televised comments about graft in the province have set her against a coalition partner for more than a week.
“If some people have objections and are levelling allegations of corruption against the Punjab government, why don’t they resign from the cabinet?” she asked.
She said she was answerable to the public for the spending of every rupee and would not spare any minister or official against whom evidence of corruption or bribery was produced. “If anyone comes forward with evidence against my minister, I will not spare them,” she said. She stopped short of claiming a clean record. “I have never said that corruption has been completely eliminated in Punjab,” she said, though she maintained that none had touched the development projects worth trillions of rupees her government has launched over three years.
She declined to comment on other provinces, whose governments she said answered to their own people, but claimed Punjab was the only one where the chief minister regularly uncovered fresh corruption cases.
Nawaz presented her party’s results on Sunday as the answer to her critics. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won by-elections in Gujranwala and Sahiwal, and she said it had done so even though opposition parties had “joined hands” against it. “No matter how much you talk or how many claims you make, if you have not served the people, there comes a day when you are deprived [of public support],” she said.
The Gujranwala seat, NA-77, fell vacant when the sitting PML-N member, Mahmood Bashir Virk, died in September, and the party fielded his son, Rashid Bashir Virk. He took 43,365 votes in the unofficial count, against 30,218 for Qazi Muhammad Ibrahim Gujjar of the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League (PMML). Turnout was 15.65 percent. The PMML has rejected the result, alleging rigging, and says it will challenge it before the Election Commission of Pakistan. The PML-N’s Asad Hanif won the Punjab Assembly seat PP-203 in Sahiwal.
Hussain, a leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), said in an interview with a private television channel on 2 November that he had no evidence but heard stories of corruption in Punjab every day. He also questioned lavish official spending, including the use of a government aircraft, and argued that ministers should be held accountable for their performance. He also claimed a disproportionate share of the provincial development budget was being spent in Lahore, the PML-N’s stronghold. On Tuesday Nawaz said her government had broken the tradition of concentrating development spending in the big cities, and cited the extension of the Green Bus service to Jhelum, Khushab, Layyah, Bhakkar, Rahim Yar Khan, Bahawalpur and Multan.
On 3 November she served a Rs5bn defamation notice on Hussain, the programme’s presenter, and the channel’s chairman, demanding an unconditional apology, a retraction and damages. The six-page notice, issued by Additional Advocate General Punjab Chaudhry Muhammad Nawaz, said Hussain had named no document, inquiry, audit observation, investigation or complaint to support his remarks. Nawaz has said the real cause of his anger was her decision to replace the deputy commissioner of Gujrat a few days earlier, because he wanted an officer of his own choosing.
Hussain has rejected that account as fabricated. He has said he stands by his allegations, that they were his personal view, and that he will file a comprehensive reply in court. On X he wrote that “transparency is never meant to exist behind closed doors”. He has ruled out the PML-Q leaving the governing coalition.
The dispute has reached the federal cabinet. Khawaja Asif, the defence minister and a senior PML-N figure, said last week that Hussain’s remarks were “part of setting the stage for some post-period”. “This statement was given selectively against Punjab. Corruption is prevalent everywhere in Pakistan,” he said, adding that he had tweeted about it many times. He described an attempt “to create an alternative arrangement” by discrediting incumbents so that “a fresh team can be presented”, and declined to elaborate beyond what he called his personal assessment.
The PML-Q’s spokesman, Ghulam Mustafa Malik, dismissed the idea of a conspiracy, said Asif had himself accepted that corruption existed, and said the government had inflated a routine statement. He also noted that only people close to Nawaz were speaking in her defence, while the PML-N’s Islamabad camp had stayed silent.
The family politics add to the strain. Hussain is the younger son of the PML-Q president, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, and the nephew of Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a former Punjab chief minister whom he praised in the interview. Elahi and his son Moonis, a former federal minister, aligned themselves with the PTI after Imran Khan’s government was removed by a no-confidence vote in 2022. The Shujaat branch of the family sided with the Sharifs. Hussain’s brother, Chaudhry Shafay Hussain, serves under Nawaz as Punjab’s minister for industries, commerce and investment.
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