ISLAMABAD: Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif met annoyed Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan for the second time in 72 hours on Thursday, giving credence to reports about differences between the minister and the Pakistan Muslim League-N high command.
Sources told Dawn that the Punjab chief minister, who had earlier spent more than two hours at Chaudhry Nisar’s residence on Tuesday, called on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif before meeting the minister at the Punjab House, seemingly in an effort to mediate between the two.
The media has been reporting for the past few weeks that Chaudhry Nisar has developed differences with the party leadership over a number of issues, including handling of the treason case against former president Pervez Musharraf. Although the party’s office-bearers and government functionaries have been constantly refuting such reports, no denial has so far been issued by the interior minister. When Shahbaz Sharif met Ch Nisar on Tuesday, the party leadership claimed that he had gone there to inquire after the health of the minister, who had not been feeling well for a month.
Know more: Shahbaz visits Nisar
The opposition parties have been protesting over the continued absence of the interior minister from the National Assembly and Senate at the crucial stage of the presentation of the federal budget and the passage of the Protection of Pakistan Bill.
Chaudhry Nisar Ali last time attended the National Assembly on June 10 and gave a policy statement on the terrorists’ attack on the Karachi airport.
On June 14, the media reported that Chaudhry Nisar had undergone angiography at a Rawalpindi hospital, but there has been no official word about his health.
Related: ‘Cracks’ surface in Nisar’s ties with PM
Soon after the passage of the Protection of Pakistan Bill by the National Assembly on Wednesday, a group of some 20 PML-N legislators met him at the nearby Punjab House.
Talking to a group of reporters after meeting Chaudhry Nisar, the ruling party MNAs denied that Chaudhry Nisar had talked about his differences with the party leadership.
Sources in the PML-N claimed that besides being unhappy over the government’s handling of the case of Pervez Musharraf, the minister was also jittery over non-allocation of funds for the internal security policy in the federal budget.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2014