Imran misquotes Iqbal, draws flak PAK NOD TO RAIL LINE UPGRADE UNDER CPEC

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday misquoted national poet Allama Mohammed Iqbal on Twitter, drawing criticism. The premier had tweeted an image with a poem and a picture of Allama Iqbal, attributing the poem to him.

“This poem by Iqbal reflects how I try to lead my life. I urge our youth to understand and absorb the poem of the great Iqbal and I guarantee them that it will release their great God-given potential that we all possess as His greatest creation,” he tweeted. Within minutes, hundreds of people corrected the PM and told him to fact check his tweets before sharing them.

Shortly after the backlash, the prime minister accepted his mistake but said that he still stood by the message of the poem irrespective of its author.

“I stand corrected — this is not Allama Iqbal’s poem but the message conveyed is what I have stood by and tried to follow and if our youth absorbs this message it will release their great Godgiven potential that all of us possess as His greatest creation,” he tweeted,

Iqbal later became a trend on the social media. A poet, Asad Maroof, who has written a similar poem said he started getting calls that the premier

Islamabad, June 7: Pakistan has approved the strategic $7.2 billion 1,872 km-long railway line upgradation project between Peshawar and Karachi under the CPEC, paving the way for the final negotiations with China for the finance, a media report said on Sunday.

The approval is a big milestone for the second phase of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), said Lieutenant General (retired) Asim Saleem Bajwa, chairman of the CPEC Authority.

The Central Development Working Party (CDWP) approved the Pakistan Railways’ Mainline-I Project. The CPEC is a planned network of roads, railways and energy projects linking China’s resourcerich Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with Pakistan’s strategic Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. had shared his poem and misquoted him.

Previously, PM Khan had also misattributed a quote by Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore attributing him to Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Jibran.