PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif on Friday said his party\u2019s legal team has cleared former prime minister Nawaz Sharif\u2019s return to Pakistan on October 21, asserting that the elder Sharif would come back to face the law and Constitution. Nawaz, who has been in self-imposed exile since 2019, left for London in the middle of his seven-year jail term on medical grounds. In the four years that transpired, Nawaz was declared a proclaimed offender in the Al Azizia and Avenfield graft cases for his continuous absence from proceedings. Last month, Shehbaz had confirmed that his elder brother was returning to the country on October 21. Subsequently, the PML-N had declared that Nawaz was ready to face \u201call kinds of circumstances\u201d upon his return from London. Earlier today, a fresh medical report of Nawaz was submitted to the Lahore High Court. It stated that the PML-N supremo had \u201csome residual anginal symptoms\u201d which would require \u201cfrequent follow-up investigations\u201d in London and Pakistan. In a media talk in Lahore in the afternoon, Shehbaz said: \u201cAs it is in your knowledge that Nawaz Sharif will, God willing, return on Oct 21. \u201cI want to respectfully say that you shouldn\u2019t ask if he is coming or not, this is confirmed now.\u201d At the outset of his address, the PML-N president talked about the 16-month tenure of the erstwhile Pakistan Democratic Movement under his premiership and recalled the challenges that confronted the then government, including floods, inflation, protests and a risk of default. \u201cWhat would have happened if Pakistan had defaulted?\u201d he asked and then outlined the \u201cconsequential impacts\u201d of such a situation. \u201cBut God helped us avert default and I am thankful to Nawaz for standing by us. \u201cIf our quaid told us to save our politics, I would have resigned, but he told us to take up the challenge and save the country instead,\u201d he said. Shehbaz elaborated on the elder Sharif\u2019s contributions to Pakistan, which included the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and making the country an atomic power, but lamented how a series of \u201cpainful events overturned Pakistan\u2019s journey of growth\u201d. \u201cI want to clarify that in 2017-18 the PML-N won the elections but the results were changed in massive rigging and a pre-prepared model was introduced to ruin the country.\u201d But now, Shehbaz continued, the journey of prosperity would resume with Nawaz\u2019s arrival. \u201cHe will himself tell his plan to change the country\u2019s future at Minar-e-Pakistan on Oct 21. It is a programme that will expedite Pakistan\u2019s growth and change its fate.\u201d He added that Nawaz shared good relations with a number of foreign countries, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, and he would use these ties not to \u201ctake loans but to get investment\u201d. When asked about remarks regarding being the \u201cestablishment\u2019s man\u201d, Shehbaz said if that was true, \u201cwhat benefits did I get?\u201d and talked about how he and his elder brother spent months in jail. At one point during the media talk, the PML-N president was also asked about journalist Imran Riaz Khan, who returned home last month after being missing for four months. But Shehbaz said he wasn\u2019t aware of the matter and said, \u201cI will look into it.\u201d \u201cI am not in favour of this \u2026 I and Nawaz Sharif were missing for several months and our parents didn\u2019t know where we were. But we never complained, we didn\u2019t attack army installations or propagated this to our supporters,\u201d Shehbaz further stated, referring to the May 9 violence \u2014 when protests erupted across the country following the first arrest of PTI Chairman Imran Khan. On a question on accountability of former army generals, he lamented that in the 75-year history of Pakistan, accountability was only restricted to politicians and called for answerability across the board. Furthermore, the PML-N president stressed that free and fair elections should be held and that the outcome should be accepted by everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif on Friday said his party\u2019s legal team has cleared former prime minister Nawaz Sharif\u2019s return to Pakistan on October 21, asserting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10235,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}