LARKANA, April 13: Former PPP MPA Ghulam Serwar Siyal and two of his relatives, who were office-bearers of the PPP’s Bakrani town chapter, resigned from the party’s basic membership on Saturday in protest against the award of ticket to the Siyal family’s political foe, Altaf Hussain Unnar, for PS-35 (Larkana-I).

Speaking a press conference here, Mr Siyal who was member of the PPP’s Sindh council and won the PS-35 in the 2008 elections, said the party leadership awarded a ticket to Mr Unnar despite his chequered record.

Mr Unnar had implicated the Siyals in false cases during local government elections in 2005 which were still pending in courts, still the leadership once again ignored him despite the fact that he had defeated Mr Unnar by a margin of 14,000 votes in the 2008 elections, he said.

He said the family had decided to field Tarique Siyal to contest PS-35 (Larkana-I) as an independent candidate against Mr Unnar.

Besides him, he said, his nephew Saeed Akbar Siyal, general secretary of the Peoples Lawyers Forum, and close relative Tarique Khan, member of PPP taluka working committee Bakrani, had resigned from the basic membership of the party. Shahid Iqbal Siyal, an office-bearer of the party, also quit the PPP during the press conference.

Mr Siyal said that he had opposed awarding a party ticket to the Unnar family head, the late Ghulam Hussain Unnar in the 1988 and 1990 elections for the Sindh Assembly seat, who later defected to Jam Sadik Ali.

He said that his family had old association with the PPP, starting with his father Paryal Siyal who had close relations with Z.A. Bhutto. His brother Illahi Bakhsh Siyal and he remained in jail during the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in 1983 and Illahi Bakhsh was murdered in 1986 when he was president of PPP’s Dokri taluka chapter, he said.