Lahore: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz supremo and three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif Thursday blamed the military establishment of 2014-17 for forcing senior judges to remove him from power.
“They (a reference to the military establishment) visited the residences of senior judges and threatened them. They achieved the required court verdicts against me through coercion,” Sharif said in a televised address to the nation Thursday.
The 73-year-old leader, the only Pakistani politician who became the prime minister of the coup-prone country for a record three times, was Tuesday acquitted in the Al-Azizia Steel mill corruption case. He has already been acquitted in the Avenfield graft case in which he was convicted in July 2018 and sentenced to ten years in Jail. He also got relief in the Flagship corruption case.
Sharif said he was happy to see the decisions in the cases against him have been in his favour because they were ‘fake and hollow’ and thanked the nation for standing by his side.
Following the reversal of his conviction in the Al-Azizia and Avenfield corruption cases, legal experts believe that he may also become eligible to contest polls and hold public office.
Sharif said a planned conspiracy was hatched against him in August 2014 when former cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan staged a sit-in in Islamabad and eventually, they got him ousted from power in 2017 through the Supreme Court.
“This conspiracy was hatched against me to bring Imran Khan into power,” he said and asked the people to become “a court and judge February 8, 2024, during the polls and make their judgement for prosperous Pakistan.”
Sharif also rued that he was likened to the ‘Sicilian mafia and Godfather’ by the SC bench that heard his cases. He said the people of Pakistan were punished through inflation and price hikes by ousting him from power.
He said that he would be more happy if prosperity returned to the country after upcoming polls.
Sharif, who led the country’s most powerful political family and the ruling PML-N party for more than three decades, suffered a heavy blow to his career when a Supreme Court ruling in the Panamagate case ousted him from power in July 2017.
Wednesday, while talking to party leaders here, Sharif blamed the Supreme Court bench that disqualified him as premier for not receiving salary from his son and two former army chiefs for a conspiracy to topple his government in 2017.
He said that it wasn’t an anti-corruption watchdog’s independent decision as a monitoring judge of the apex court was appointed to ensure that he must be punished.
“I want to know who conspired against me. In fact, they conspired against the people of this country. Neither had I made any conspiracy against former army chiefs – retired Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and Raheel Sharif then why I was sent packing in 2017,” he asked.
He reiterated his stance of not seeking revenge from those behind his government’s ouster but he strongly insisted that such elements must be brought to justice otherwise this cycle would not break.
Known as the ‘Lion of Punjab’, Sharif became the Prime Minister in the politically unstable Pakistan for a record three times, but every time he was forced to quit in the middle of his term.
In October, Sharif returned to Pakistan from the UK where he spent four years in self-exile.
PTI