MIRPURKHAS: Senior Sindh Minister for Food and Parliamentary Affairs Nisar Ahmed Khuhro has demanded that the proceedings of the joint investigation team set up to further probe into allegations on the prime minister and his family regarding the Panamagate case should be open.

The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) would rid the country of Mr Sharif and his family and with the help of the masses the party would not allow them to escape abroad, he added.

Mr Khuhro, who is also president of PPP’s Sindh chapter, was speaking at a large sit-in on the Hyderabad-Mirpurkhas Road outside the press club here on Thursday.

The sit-in, which was attended by hundreds of party workers and PPP legislators from Mirpurkhas, Umer­kot and Tharparkar, was part of the party’s ongoing protest drive against the Centre’s policies with regard to Sindh.

He said democracy was restored in the country as a result of supreme sacrifices laid down by the party’s leaders but present rulers were ruining it with their “illegal steps and wrong policies”.

He condemned what he saw as the federal government’s excesses with Sindh and said the federal government had shut power, water and gas supplies to the province, forcing people to take to the streets. The federal government’s discriminatory policies were creating hatred among Sindhis, he said.

He said the prime minister had been speaking untruths in the National Assembly in the past but now the apex court had also declared that he was not Sadiq and Amin. Such a person was making false promises to masses about progress and prosperity and resolution of their problems within days, he said.

He blamed “massive corruption” by the Sharif government for the fiasco of the Nandipur power generation project and said the federal government had occupied water, power and gas resources of other provinces.

Mr Khuhro raised the slogan of ‘Go Nawaz go’ and others at the end of his speech.

PPP Sindh vice president and MNA Nafisa Shah said that their protest was against the ‘Nakam League’.

The party was now staging sit-ins on divisional basis in the second phase of its protests as it had already held demonstrations on district level across the province against the ‘excesses’ of the federal government, she said.

She said the Sharif government had occupied resources of Sindh and was not giving the province its due share in national resources. As a result, opposition in Sindh was strengthening day by day against the Centre, she said.

She said that a National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) was being signed to save skins of some influential persons.

Former PPP MNA Pir Aftab Hussain Shah Jilani blamed the prime minister and his cabinet for being involved in looting the national exchequer and asked the departments concerned to take notice of the “massive robbery” and punish the culprits.

Senior PPP leader Rashid Rabbani said that people of Sindh should get united for getting rights from the federal government because the federation had occupied power, gas and water resources of Sindh.

He said the PPP’s struggle for rights would continue till the province secured all its rights. PPP Sindh general secretary Waqar Mehdi, Senator Aajiz Dhamra and other leaders also spoke on the occasion.

Meanwhile, younger brother of PPP MPA Khairunnisa Mughal created some disturbance during speeches by leaders when he slap­ped a journalist of a private TV channel. But senior office-bearers of PPP soon intervened and settled the dispute.

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2017