PTI govt will have to go: PDM

PESHAWAR: Opposition leaders at a public meeting said the PTI government will “have to go home by January” and called upon the masses to hold the rulers as well as their “selectors” accountable.

While addressing a rally in Peshawar arranged by the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), Bilawal lamented that the erstwhile Fata was still deprived of its rights as the government was not releasing adequate funds for its development. He said that the people who had been displaced due to terrorism and military operations against militants had still not been rehabilitated. Residents whose family members had been killed by terrorists or whose houses and shops had suffered damages had not been compensated either, the PPP chief said.

Bilawal told the crowd that his party had struggled for Fata’s merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for a long time and his mother, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had even gone to court.

“Today, Fata has been merged with KP on paper but its people are not being given their rights. Even now areas in erstwhile Fata are off-limits [to visitors]. There are still legal blackholes, there are still internment centres. Late Peshawar High Court chief justice Waqar Seth had ruled that internment centres should be handed over to the police but sadly we never saw that happen,” he said.