LAHORE: Hinting that the party may field his younger brother as a candidate from Karachi, PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif on Monday asked residents of the city by the sea why they ignored his party in the polls even though it had served them best.

Addressing ticket aspirants from Sindh at the party’s provincial secretariat in Model Town on Monday, he boasted of all the development work carried out in Lahore under Shehbaz Sharif’s watch, adding that no such project was completed in Karachi.

“We maintained peace and ended terrorism in Karachi. We made a tunnel in Chitral, but when the elections took place the people voted for someone else... why?” he asked, adding that his government had also set up a 2,200MW power plant in Sindh and also made electricity from coal there.

Drawing a comparison between his brother’s development works in Punjab with those in Karachi, the elder Sharif said: “Why no progress is made in Karachi... not a single water project was completed while we had initiated the Green Line work there, but buses have yet to ply. On the contrary, Shehbaz Sharif had launched a metro bus project in Punjab and the Orange Line in Lahore.”

Recounting Lahore’s development under younger brother, ‘N’ supremo asks why voters down south have ‘ignored’ their party

Asking Karachiites to do some ‘soul searching’ ahead of the upcoming elections, he hinted that Shehbaz may be running for election from a Karachi constituency.

If Shehbaz Sharif does run for office from Karachi, it may be on the same Baldia Town seat that he contested in the 2018 elections. However, that time around, he lost to then-PTI leader Faisal Vawda in NA-249, which has now been renumbered to NA-242 in the upcoming polls.

His candidature was one of the points agreed upon with MQM-P leaders during a recent meeting. The party had planned to field Mustafa Kamal from the same constituency, but reportedly backed down after it emerged that Mr Sharif may seek to contest from there.

Party sources told Dawn that one of the main reasons why Shehbaz Sharif may contest from Karachi would be to negate the impression that the city has never been important for the PML-N.

This is the narrative that has been built by their rivals in Sindh over the years, a source said.

However, PML-N Karachi chapter general secretary Nasiruddin Mahmood has been quite confident for some time that the younger Sharif would contest from Karachi.

“Mian Sahib is for sure going to contest from Karachi,” he told Dawn a few weeks ago.

‘PM in morning, hijacker in evening’

The elder Sharif also regretted his ouster from power in 2017, despite there being no evidence of corruption against him.

“In 1999, I was prime minister in the morning and in the evening I was declared a hijacker. Similarly in 2017, I was ousted from power for not taking salary from my son. They made this decision as they wanted to bring their selected man into power,” he said, referring to arch-rival Imran Khan.

He said that polls were rigged in 2018 through the RTS and a party was brought into power that could not even build a single motorway.

“Our government had completed the Peshawar to Sukkur motorway while the Sukkur to Hyderabad patch was to be completed, but the PTI government could not do it,” he recalled.

Mr Sharif claimed that when he was in power, there was no inflation and unemployment in the country, the people were prosperous and the country was progressing in leaps and bounds.

He credited his government for bringing in CPEC and said Pakistan might have been part of the G20 had his government not been sent packing.

“We never violated the law and Constitution... never worked against Pakistan then why was I ousted from power,” he asked and added that the Islamabad High Court threw out the cases against him in two to three hearings because they were fake cases.

The PML-N supremo has been making speeches at meetings of his party’s parliamentary board since his homecoming in October, four years after he went into self-imposed exile to the UK on medical grounds.

But the party, which had earlier said it was waiting for Mr Sharif to get a clean chit in all the cases against him before launching its election campaign, has yet to do so.

Sadiq says ‘will dance if Nawaz becomes PM’

In a lighter vein, former NA speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq said on Monday that if Nawaz Sharif became prime minister for a fourth time, “he would dance”. Meanwhile, PML-N Sindh President and Bashir Memon told reporters that Nawaz Sharif and his daughter would soon visit Sindh.

Imran Ayub in Karachi also contributed to this report

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2023