Maryam shares Nawaz Sharif's letter penned to her from jail on Father Day

Tariq Butt, Correspondent

To mark the World Father’s Day Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Maryam shared her father’s brief letter written to her while both of them were serving jail term last year.

“Every day is #FathersDay for me but today there is no greater tribute than this brief letter. That even while going [to face] one revenge to another, the father is not concerned about his person, but about the daughter lying in the other dark prison cell. One life is too little to sacrifice for such a father!” she said in a tweet.

The brief handwritten letter in Urdu language penned on Oct.11, 2019, shared in the tweet, reads: “Dear daughter Maryam, Assalam-o-Alaikum. (The) NAB men are taking me away (from Kot Lakhpat Jail to National Accountability Bureau’s offices in Lahore) in Chaudhry Sugar Mills case today. I pray to Allah that He may create relief for us all. Take care of yourself and don’t worry. Allah may grant His mercy in abundance. My prayers are with you. Allah Hafiz. Father.”

The former prime minister is in London since November 2019 as the Lahore High Court (LHC) granted him bail for treatment of his complicated heart problem after more than one medical boards set up by the government advised his treatment abroad as no local hospitals had the required facilities.

The ruling party didn’t challenge the LHC orders before the Supreme Court, though its leaders would publicly doubt the test reports on the basis of which the medical board advised Mr Sharif’s treatment abroad.

Maryam was also bailed out and she saw her father off to London on a special air ambulance. But she was not allowed to leave the country as Sharif’s treatment is still pending with many saying that the former prime minister wished that his daughter should be on his bedside when he would undergo heart surgery.

She has been apparently inactive in politics and in social media since then, allowing the critiques to say that perhaps her silence is part of some sort of deal reached with the Sharifs to give them relief in the court cases.

During this time, she rarely commented on any political development other than related to her father’s health, particularly pictures of Sharif having coffee at Starbucks close to his residence in London.