Pakistan People’s Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that a neighboring institute of the parliament is responsible for instability in the country, reported the 24NewsHD TV channel.
Addressing the joint session of parliament on Monday, he asked Pakistan Tehreek-Insaaf (PTI) leadership that if the PTI is a political party, then it should first condemn the arson attacks and violence — perpetrated during widespread protests following the arrest of party chairman Imran Khan — and apologise.
“PTI should decide whether it wants to remain a political party or not," Bilawal Bhutto said, adding that if the PTI does not condemn terrorism, it should be treated as a terrorist.
"If it does not apologise, then we will not negotiate with a 'militant party', whether on the instructions of the chief justice or anyone else," he asserted. He added that PTI has one last chance to "clarify whether it wants to become a political party or not".
Bilawal taking a jibe at the higher judiciary for what the ruling coalition believes to be facilitating the PTI chief, Bilawal said the judges had turned the law into a joke.
He pointed out that when his grandfather, PPP founder and former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged, the party activists, unlike how the PTI responded to its chairman’s arrest, had only set themselves ablaze instead of destroying public as well as private properties.
“On the martyrdom of Benazir Bhutto, my father Asif Ali Zardari raised the slogan of Pakistan khape (long live Pakistan),” Bilawal Bhutto hinted, adding he also raised the slogan "Democracy is the best revenge" for the sake of the country.
He noted that his maternal uncle, Murtaza Bhutto, was murdered in Karachi as well but nobody had taken the law into their hands. He said his father, PPP Co-Chairperson Asif Ali Zardari, had spent 12 years in prison but no chief justice of Pakistan had taken suo motu notice of that.
The PPP chairman pointed out that when his mother, former premier Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, they did not attack the GHQ and the corps commander’s house.
The minister for foreign affairs said that the people are yet sitting in Islamabad who jailed the martyr Ms. Benazir Bhutto and who hanged his grandfather.
He asked if they had raised the slogan of revenge, would there be Pakistan today? “We carried the dead body of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto on our shoulders for the sake of the country,” he added.