PESHAWAR: The Pakistan People’s Party doesn’t see a rosy future for itself in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as local leaders and activists have yet to iron out differences despite a warning by Pakistan People’s Party Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari in the Lahore convention on Dec 2.

The PPP provincial chapter has already announced the holding of the workers’ convention in Peshawar on Jan 5, 2015.

There are unconfirmed reports about the party’s co-chairperson reaching the city for the event.

Read: Is the party over?

Though the annoyed workers are avoiding issuing statements to media, they have returned to Peshawar with a heavy heart from Lahore due to the harsh attitude of Zardari.

Some senior activists said they didn’t expect such remarks from the party’s co-chairperson.

Leadership doesn’t want to lose workers whose loyalty is time-tested

“We have done nothing wrong but only demanded the holding of intra-party polls in the province to elect credible, honest and worker-friendly persons as new office-bearers,” a leader told Dawn on condition of anonymity.

He said poor workers had no place in PPP any longer.

He said the annoyed workers would review the entire situation within a couple of days to devise future plan for welfare of the party workers, saying no one had the right to use the workers for their interests.

However, the party’s provincial office-bearers are satisfied with what happened in Lahore and they hope that after the warning of Zardari, there should be no differences in the party.

According to PPP provincial president Khanzada Khan, general secretary Humayun Khan and information secretary Liaquat Shabab, there is no grouping in the party and those with some reservations would have to work calmly in line with the party’s policy.

Appreciating the people for participation in the Lahore convention, these leaders asked all workers to come forward, join hands and work for the strengthening of the party.

According to them, the workers’ convention scheduled for Jan 5 in Peshawar will be a begging of the new era to bring all workers on the same platform in the province.

However, it is not known if annoyed workers will participate in the imminent event.

It will be a challenge for office-bearers to bring disgruntled people to the convention.

A leader said it would be very difficult rather impossible for the provincial president to ignore annoyed workers because they have got themselves organised across the province and enjoy full support of all those with complaints against the PPP leaders, who remained ministers in the previous government.

Many of them have been associated with the party since their student life, who have strong links with activists of different sister organisations and can create problems for the party’s candidates in future.

At present, it seems PPP doesn’t want to lose ideological workers, especially those in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, whose loyalty to the party is time-tested and who have rendered sacrifices for the party during testing times.

This convention will be really a test of nerves of all provincial office-bearers to ensure participation of annoyed people and assure the top leadership that they all are fully united to prepare themselves for next elections.

PPP provincial president Khanzada Khan also described workers as an asset of the party and urged them to directly contact him in case of any complaint to remove their reservations timely.

Talking to Dawn on Saturday, he was optimistic about resolution of all issues with the disgruntled workers and said the central leadership had given him full powers to take steps for smoothly running the party’s affairs but he always wished to remove reservations of the workers on logical ground.

“Workers should come to me and I am bound to satisfy them. The sitting office bearers are very hardworking, competent and also sparing time out of their routine life to serve the party in any part of the province and that is why I like them,” he said.

Khanzada Khan said all those who had sacrificed their time and money for PPP would be given respect and key party positions.

Published in Dawn, December 7th, 2014