Atif Mian. PHOTO: YouTube/Screenshot
KARACHI: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has removed economist Atif Mian’s name from the government’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC), days after the information minister vowed not to bow to extremists.
The decision came after pressure by extremist elements for including an Atif, an Ahmadi, in the council.
PTI senator Faisal Javed said in a statement that the party had asked the economist to step down and would announce a replacement soon.
Information Minister Fawad Hussain also took to Twitter and said that Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ideal is the welfare state of Madina and all of his cabinet members held the Holy Prophet (PBUH) in high regard. “The concept of the finality of prophet-hood is part of our belief,” he said in his tweet.
Read: Who is Atif Mian and why is everyone talking about him?
Earlier, Hussain defended the government’s decision to include an Ahmadi in the council, saying members of minority communities had every right to become part of state institutions.
Atif Mian, one of International Monetary Fund’s 25 brightest young economists, is a professor of Economics at Princeton and co-author of the critically acclaimed House of Debt, which builds on powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession and continues to threaten the global economy, according to the International Business Times.
He has been tapped to win a Nobel Prize in the coming few years for his contributions to the field of economics, something that the information minister pointed out to himself in one of his talks to the media while defending the government’s initial nomination.
The sudden withdrawal didn’t win much applause on Twitter, with many hitting out at the PTI for caving to extremist pressure.
Kashif Chaudhry, an Ahmadi living in self-exile in the United States, tweeted grim reminder of why he had to leave the country.
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