Ummeed-e-Pakistan: Nawaz returns home, to lead party in January 2024 NA elections
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Three-time Prime Minister Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif on Saturday returned home after a four-year-long self-exile in the United Kingdom to lead his Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) party in the scheduled elections to National Assembly in January 2024, and try to secure a fourth term.
The 73-year-old PML-N supremo flew from Dubai to Islamabad on a special chartered flight named Ummeed-e-Pakistan.
On October 12, he left London for Saudi Arabia to perform the Umrah pilgrimage in Mecca and spent time with his family members there since.
Sharif’s legal team will meet him to take his biometrics and submit it to the Islamabad High Court as part of the bail process approved by the court on October 19, the media reported.
From Islamabad, he will leave for Lahore to address a rally at Minar-e-Pakistan on Saturday evening.
His party is trying to paint his homecoming as a new hope for Pakistan. No call was given for party workers to welcome him at the airport but dozens of supporters thronged the Islamabad airport.
About 150 PML-N supporters, who were on board the special flight, kept on chanting slogans throughout the journey from Dubai to Islamabad.
Sharif, however, stayed calm during the flight and apparently read the notes for his address in Lahore in the evening.
Speaking to reporters at Dubai airport, the former PM deplored Pakistan’s “very chaotic” situation and expressed confidence that his party was “competent” to take the cash-strapped country out of the current financial crisis.
“I’m going back to Pakistan after four years today…When I was leaving Pakistan and going abroad I had no feeling of happiness but today I am happy.”
It would have been very good if Pakistan’s condition was better today as compared to 2017, he remarked.
“I get very worried and disappointed seeing the situation in the country. Instead of moving forward, it has now slipped backward economically and unity-wise. Pakistan should get back on its feet as nobody else would lift it up.”
“When I remember Pakistan back then, I feel hurt. We had said goodbye to the International Monetary Fund, electricity was cheap, the rupee was stable, there was employment, roti cost Rs. 4, a poor family’s child went to school and medicines were also cheap.”
Asked about the coming elections, Sharif said only the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) can decide the polling dates. Whatever date the ECP announces, everyone will abide by it.
Lamenting the treatment meted out to him in the past, he said he had gone through 150 court hearings.
“Not just me but also my daughter. She even got a clean chit. She had to get it. She didn’t have a position during my government, not even an office.”
He said fake cases were not just filed against his family, including former PM and his brother Shehbaz Sharif, but also ex-Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan and PML-N leader Hanif Abbasi.
Sharif left for London in November 2019 on medical grounds after a higher court granted him bail for four weeks. By that time, he had served half of his seven-year jail term in the Al-Azizia corruption case.
During the four years since then, he was declared a proclaimed offender in Al-Azizia and Avenfield corruption cases for his continuous absence from the proceedings on appeals against the sentences.
The Islamabad High Court on Thursday granted him protective bail until October 24 in both cases after the National Accountability Bureau, Pakistan’s anti-corruption agency, did not oppose the petitions filed by him.
He stepped down as Pakistan’s PM in 2017. The Supreme Court disqualified him for life from holding public office after a probe into his family’s wealth following the 2016 Panama Papers leak. However, before it left office in August, the Shehbaz government changed the laws, paving the way for his return to Pakistan.
Sharif has consistently denied any wrongdoing and termed it as a politically motivated case.
