PML-N leaders and their foot-in-mouth reflex.

LAHORE: PML-N leader Javed Latif's controversial statement, that should something happen to Maryam Nawazy "we (the party) won't raise the Pakistan Khappay (we want Pakistan) slogan", has caused outrage among the public; and very rightly so. His remarks came a day after former three-time prime minister and PML-N 'Quaid' Nawaz Sharif said Maryam's life was in danger since she was receiving threats and that he would hold the military leadership directly responsible if anything happened to her.

Going by Latif's statement it seems PML-N is pretty sure that Nawaz Sharif based his assertion on certain facts or evidence, but unless the same is forthcoming sometime soon the former prime minister's accusations can, for all intents and purposes, be only taken as a political gambit meant to grab the initiative in an otherwise desperate situation.

But it doesn't seem to have had the intended effect beyond the tame party base. Increasingly people are not just finding it in bad taste, especially the Javed Latif kind of reaction to it, but some people believe that PML-N has repeatedly crossed the red line when it comes to insulting state institutions and this time it has just gone too far.

Ever since Nawaz's unceremonious exit from the prime minister's office not long after the last general election PML-N seems to have made a habit of attacking important pillars of the state whenever it is pushed into a corner. Surely nobody has forgotten former national assembly speaker Ayaz Sadiq's rather unsavoury comments about the so-called Abhinandan incident. When he said that the PTI government let the captured Indian pilot go so quickly because it "feared an attack from India" he very clearly distorted facts to win brownie points in a slugfest of a very domestic nature. And he, too, failed to win any sort of public sympathy. This was, however, not the only incident in which a senior PML-N leader responded to an unforeseen situation by putting his foot in his mouth.

Then Nawaz Sharif himself...