PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz said on Sunday that the people who had been branded as traitors were instead adopted as heroes by Pakistan’s 220 million population.
While addressing a worker’s convention in Sheikhupura, Maryam said that Fatima Jinnah was the first to be branded a traitor and the label had been applied to PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif and herself as well.
“If calling right as right, the truth the truth and talking about the supremacy of the Constitution, institutions and abiding the law is ghaddari (treachery) then we will do ghaddari again and again.”
She said the times were changing and they had stopped being afraid. Maryam said: “Those they branded as traitors after such efforts were instead adopted as heroes by Pakistan’s 220m population.”
Maryam added that all manner of accusations had been placed on Nawaz but decisions were coming in favour from every “corner of Pakistan” despite him being in London. Pointing to the PML-N’s victory in the Daska by-election, she said people had supported his stance and given respect to the vote.
“Should I tell you who are the [real] traitors? The nation knows who are the traitors.”
Maryam claimed there was a time when traitors occupied seats of power and people waited for their abdication to call them a traitor but now “the time has changed. They are sitting on the seats but the nation is not worried about saying who are the traitors.”
The PML-N vice president then went on to describe what she considered as acts of traitors such as: making a deal for Kashmir and Kashmiris; criticising Pakistan’s ambassadors and foreign missions while the international and Pakistani media was watching; planning to secretly sell Kashmir while sitting in other countries; playing with the lives of the population and more.
“Nawaz Sharif was the nation’s prime minister who came through votes and was not a selected prime minister who came after being selected or climbing anyone’s shoulders.
“When you use Pakistan’s national institutions to remove such a prime minister then that is called ghaddari,” said Maryam.
She also added that when fingers were raised at national institutions, dirtied and likened as criminals in the eyes of the people and subjected to “the fire of criticism” then that was also called “treachery with Pakistan”.
“When names like (Justice) Qazi Faez Isa and Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui are dirtied and the judiciary is made controversial then this is called treachery.”
Maryam said that now no one was ready to believe these labels of traitor and if someone as patriotic as PML-N’s Javed Latif was labelled as a traitor then “remember, your day of accountability is near.”
Dawn News