DADU: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman Imran Khan has said that he has never seen anybody being stopped from visiting a shrine at any hour of the day in any part of the country and the pretext used for denying him entry into Qalandar Lal Shahbaz’s shrine only shows the “fear of change” that has already arrived in Sindh.

He said that when he went to pay his respects at the shrine on Sunday night, armed men standing guard outside did not allow him to enter on the pretext that “I could not go into the shrine along with armed guards. Anybody can watch the footage and see for himself there were no guards with me.”

Imran Khan was speaking to journalists at the residence of PTI leader Sardar Yar Mohammad Rind at Jhangara-Bajara town near Sehwan on Monday.

He said the Pakistan Peoples Party had turned the province into a police state with no real freedom for people and reduced police to its “personal militant wing” which was used to terrorise people into obedience. “I can assure you that if people are freed from fear of police and punitive actions by the government, the PPP cannot win even a seat in the province,” he said.

He said that PTI had launched the drive against PPP’s corruption and nobody could stop it now. PTI was preparing people to wage a struggle against the corrupt. Sindh people hated PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari and his sister MNA Faryal Talpur and they were yearning to get rid of them, he said.

Mr Khan said that since head of National Accountability Bureau and other state institutions were appointed by rulers, people had pinned all their hopes on judiciary.

He reiterated his call for early elections and said that if a government was working against the interests of the very people who had elected it the only democratic recourse left to voters was to demand early elections.

It never happened in any country of the world that a sitting prime minister and his cabinet supported a former prime minister disqualified by the country’s highest court, he said.

PTI leaders Shah Mehmood Qur­eshi, Jahangir Tareen, Liaquat Ali Jatoi and Sardar Yar Moham­mad Rind were present during the media talk.

PTI protests shrine incident, NTS paper leak

HYDERABAD: PTI activists held a demonstration outside the local press club on Monday in protest against denying the party chief and other leaders entry into Qalandar’s shrine and “gross irregularities” in pre-entry test for admission to Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences conducted by National Testing Services (NTS) on Sunday.

PTI leaders Dr Mustansar Billah, Ali Hingoro and Jawaid Iqbal told reporters that PPP leaders were so furious at chairman Imran Khan’s criticism of corruption in the province that they instructed Jamshoro police not to allow him into the shrine. The desperate move could not stop Sindh people from supporting PTI, he said.

They alleged that question paper of the pre-entry test was leaked at 5am and sold to candidates for a rate between Rs1.1 and Rs1.2 million. Besides, many candidates had answers on their WhatsApp numbers which they had bought for prices ranging from Rs50,000 to 100,000, they said.

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2017