Shehbaz Sharif seems to have been making untiring efforts to restore the image of his brother, Nawaz Sharif, who has been in self-imposed exile since 2019 after the latter left for London in the middle of his seven-year jail term on medical grounds. According to Shehbaz Sharif, Nawaz Sharif is returning to the country on October 21. Speaking to party workers, Shehbaz has said that the rates of wheat flour and sugar during Nawaz’s tenure were Rs35 and Rs52, respectively.

No doubt, Shehbaz has told the truth, but not the whole truth. Unfortunately, however, he seems to have lost sight of the fact that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) that came to power following the ouster of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government of Imran Khan through a vote of no-confidence against him in April last year was responsible of creating an economic impasse that has refused to die down even after the arrival of a caretaker setup in the country.

The then PDM coalition government repeatedly claimed that it had helped the country successfully avert sovereign default without admitting the fact that it was itself responsible for bringing the country to the precipice of default. The truth of the matter is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the friends of Pakistan such as China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE helped the then PDM government to successfully deal with the challenge of sovereign default.

The economic mess the PDM government has bequeathed to the current interim government is profoundly complex and formidable, to say the least. His pro-Nawaz Sharif rhetoric cannot absolve him of the sin of creating immense human misery in the country through an economic policy that led to cause, among other things, unprecedented rise in prices of daily use items, including those of sugar and wheat flour.

Nasir Bangash

Peshawar

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023