DADU: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) leader and a former chief minister of Sindh Liaquat Ali Jatoi led a big procession of local party leaders, activists and supporters which arrived in his native village Betto Jatoi of taluka Mehar from Karachi on Saturday via Sehwan, Bhan Syedabad, Khudabad, Dadu, Shaheed Makhdoom Bilawal, Kakar, Khairpur Nathan Shah and Mehar towns.

Village heads belonging to various tribes and clans also joined the procession and attended a public meeting held in Betto Jatoi.

Speaking to them, Mr Jatoi said PTI had grown big enough now to contest the general elections in Sindh without making alliance with any other party. “This is thanks to the failure of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government at the Centre and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government in Sindh,” said Mr Jatoi. He said the masses had turned to the PTI because the leaderships of both the ruling parties neglected people across their respective tenures.

Mr Jatoi claimed that the poor continued to face abject poverty over the last nine years while leaders, lawmakers and senior party activists of the ruling parties remained busy amassing money through corruption, plunder and robbing ordinary citizens of their money and rights. The funds meant for development and welfare were pocketed by the ruling parties with the result that education, health and other sectors suffered total destruction rendering the country without progress and the masses without any improvement in their lifestyle, he added.

“Corruption and plunder on the part of the two [ruling] parties has resulted in the collapse of the national economy,” he said, and argued that the masses were looking to the PTI to save them from descending to beggary as they had been forced into slavery of the rich class over the last nine years.

“Now they [PML-N and PPP] are struggling hard to attain delimitation of their choice to achieve favourable results in the next general elections,” Mr Jatoi said, and stressed that there was no need for [new] delimitations across the country. He called for early elections, saying that governments at the Centre and in Sindh had practically collapsed.

Mr Jatoi welcomed merger of the Sindh National Front (SNF) with the PTI and said this would further strengthen the PTI in Sindh.

Sindh PTI vice president and former senator Sadaqat Ali Jatoi, Karim Ali Jatoi and Sardar Ashiq Ali Zounr accompanied Mr Jatoi.

Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2017