Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan on Sunday claimed his condemnations of Gen. (retd.) Qamar Javed Bajwa are a “personal dispute” and he has no intention of taking any legal action against the former Army chief if his party returns to power.
In a meeting with a delegation of the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE) in Lahore, he reiterated his allegations against the actions of the former Army chief, claiming he had become convinced of a “conspiracy” to topple the PTI government when Lt. Gen. (retd.) Faiz Hameed was removed as head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
“I told Gen. Bajwa that if the plan to topple the government succeeds, no one will be able to manage the country’s economy,” he reiterated, adding he had also questioned how Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif could be considered for the top slot while he was facing charges of corruption. Lamenting that corruption was not a “major issue” for the former Army chief as he was himself corrupt, Khan added: “I told Gen. Bajwa that if we catch 10-12 top corrupt people, everything will get on the right track. We had a decent relationship with Gen. Bajwa but I don’t know what happened later.”
During his meeting, the ousted prime minister also reiterated claims that the former Chief of Army Staff had suggested Aleem Khan for the chief minister of Punjab instead of Usman Buzdar. However, he said, he had rejected this after discovering the alleged corruption of Aleem, who was a PTI stalwart until the vote of no-confidence that saw the party’s ouster.
To a question, Khan said incumbent Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) Gen. Asim Munir had said the military would neutral in politics. However, he added, the biggest test of this neutrality would be for the independent Election Commission of Pakistan to conduct elections within three months of the dissolution of the Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa assemblies.
On the economy, Khan claimed the “success” of his government would have been more evidence if the COVID-19 pandemic had not shut down the world for two years. Reiterating that no country could prosper without rule of law, he said this also caused issues for the national economy in repaying its loans.
On the Toshakhana scandal, in which Khan is accused of withholding financial data from the ECP, the PTI chief claimed this “proves” there was no corruption in his government. “Toshakhana is not a museum. If I had not bought the watch, it would have been bought by someone else during an auction,” he said, equating himself to “corrupt” Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari by claiming they, too, had bought expensive cars from the Toshakhana.
To another question, Khan claimed he would not form a weak government after the next elections, maintaining such a setup hampered any concrete results.