KOHAT: Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has said that he does not have any political rivals as “neither any player nor anyone else” can compete with him in politics.

Addressing the party’s rally in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohat district yesterday, the PPP chief took a veiled jibe at his political opponents, saying that they are contesting elections for their vested interests.

On the other hand, the PPP chief said he is contesting polls against his rivals to resolve the issues of the masses.

“Someone is fighting elections to get out of jail while someone is fighting to escape from jail,” Bilawal said at the rally. He said the PPP does not represent the elite as it is “representative of the workers and poor of the country”.

“We will bury the traditional politics of division and initiate the politics that aims at serving the masses.” The PPP chief also expressed hope that his party would form the government after the upcoming general elections and ensure that the masses would get their rights.

The PPP chief said he was warned against holding party conventions in KP amid security threat alerts. “But [..] our workers say they are neither scared nor they would surrender before terrorism.”

Bilawal said Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) wanted to roll back the 18th Amendment in a bid to curtail the autonomy of the provinces. The PPP chief’s public gathering was part of election campaign that he has been running in the run-up to the general elections scheduled to take place on February 8 next year.

Politicking has been on the rise across the country since the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) announced the Feb 8 election date following the Supreme Court’s intervention. Referring to the PPP founder and former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto death sentence reference, Bilawal said he was expecting that the truth would be told to the entire world. “We hope that the entire will be told why the leader of the Muslim world was hanged.”

The Supreme Court is set to take up the 12-year-old presidential reference on revisiting the controversial death sentence awarded to former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto next week, The News reported.

It is pertinent to mention that former president Asif Ali Zardari, on April 2, 2011, had approached the apex court through a presidential reference under Article 186 of the Constitution to seek its opinion on revisiting the trial of the PPP founder. The last hearing of the reference was held on November 11, 2022.

Published in The Daily National Courier, December, 11 2023

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