KARACHI: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) parliamentary leader in the Sindh Assembly Nisar Ahmad Khuhro on Friday strongly criticised Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) chief Dr Farooq Sattar for again raising the issue of a separate province for the Urdu-speaking people of Sindh.

Speaking to the media outside the Sindh Assembly building on Friday, Mr Khuhro termed Dr Sattar’s statement during the latter’s press conference a day earlier “a conspiracy to create hatred among the people living in Sindh”.

“Such a dream will never come true,” the senior PPP leader and provincial minister for food and parliamentary affairs said.

Dr Sattar should tell people that under whose pressure he resorted to raising the slogan of a separate province again, he said, adding that whenever such a slogan was raised, the people of Sindh had irrevocably expressed their resolve to foil any such designs by quoting great freedom fighter General Hoshu Sheedi’s slogan: Marwesoon par Sindh na desoon (I will rather die than surrender Sindh). Mr Khuhro said the MQM-P should stop befooling the masses by raising such slogans again and again.

Commenting on the recent developments involving the MQM-P and the Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP), the PPP leader observed that Dr Sattar might have been under pressure from some quarters. “If it’s an institution, he should expose it with courage to come out of its pressure and then [PSP leader] Mustafa Kamal should expose the people under whose instruction the two parties had to engage in such politics,” he said.

Mr Khuhro said institutions were not supposed to indulging themselves in politics; they should work within their constitutional limits.

MQM-P parliamentary leader in the house Syed Sardar Ahmad said there had been no mention of a separate province at any meeting of his party colleagues he attended in the recent past. The meetings with the PSP leadership focused only on an “electoral alliance”, he said, and clarified that there was no idea of doing away with any party’s name, or emergence of a new party, discussed at such meetings.

Earlier, the Sindh Assembly resumed its ongoing session on Friday but the chair adjourned the proceedings till Monday morning without taking up the order of the day after Mr Khuhro requested Deputy Speaker Syeda Shehla Raza, who was presiding over the proceedings, to defer the order of the day on account of the Chehlum of Shuhada-i-Karbala, being observed today.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2017