ISLAMABAD: A key Pakistan Peoples Party leader, Senator Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, broke his silence on Saturday and announced that he had resigned as official spokesperson for party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari.

He, however, said that he would continue to be a part of the PPP.

“I have resigned from the position of spokesperson to the chairman, not from (the) PPP. (I) will stand by BBZ (Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari) through thick and thin. In my years as his spokesperson, have given (him) counsel with honesty, sincerity and in the best interest of the country and the party,” Mr Khokhar wrote on his official account on Twitter.

But he did not assign any reason to his decision, thus lending weight to reports that he had been “unhappy” and “uncomfortable” with the party leadership for quite some days.

PPP leaders deny the senator has differences with party leadership on policy issues

Talking to Dawn, Mr Khokhar refused to disclose the reasons behind his decision to quit the key position in the PPP at a time when his party is running a crucial anti-government campaign from the platform of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM).

“All I can say at this point is that I would be able to comment and express my thoughts more freely, without any compulsions and responsibility that comes with the position of spokesperson of a party head,” Mr Khokhar said, while indirectly confirming that he had some differences with the party leadership, particularly Mr Bhutto-Zardari on some issues.

“Pakistan is passing through precarious times, which requires engaging in bold conversations within the bounds of decency,” said Mr Khokhar, who is among some of the frontline PPP leaders who defend their party forcefully and emphatically in media and at every forum.

Mr Khokhar, who is also the chairman of the Senate human rights committee, has made the announcement at a time when almost all important PPP leaders, including Mr Bhutto-Zardari, are in Lahore ahead of the PDM’s public meeting scheduled for Sunday (today).

A number of PPP leaders, when contacted, confirmed that Mr Khokhar had distanced himself from his party’s activities in recent days for unknown reasons.

The PPP leaders, however, denied that Mr Khokhar had resigned because of differences on some policy matters and believed that “something had happened between the chairman and him”. “Perhaps he (Mr Khokhar) has felt offended with some remarks or behaviour of Mr Bhutto-Zardari and made it an ego issue,” said a PPP office-bearer, who claims to be privy to some of the developments in this regard.

The news about Mr Khokhar’s decision to quit the position of spokesman for the party chairman went viral on social and main media on Friday when a senior journalist who had been covering the PPP for over two decades through a tweet revealed that Mr Khokhar had left a WhatsApp group that the party had created prior to the 2018 general elections for in-house coordination.

Interestingly, the PPP’s Media Centre in Islamabad and Bilawal House in Karachi had not only officially refuted the reports that Mr Khokhar had resigned from the position of chairman’s spokesman, but also said such reports were intentionally being spread by some people with a “mala fide intent”.

On Saturday, despite repeated attempts to record comments, no one in the party was found willing to officially speak on the matter.

PPP’s vice president Sherry Rehman, however, said that Senator Khokhar was one of “our frontline senators and a valuable member of the core PPP team”.

She said the senator was “very much in the party” and “he will be working with us in other capacity”.

Meanwhile, sources close to Mr Khokhar claimed that the PPP senator was angry over the party’s decision about resignations from the assemblies and the party leadership’s back-channel contacts with the military establishment. They quoted Mr Khokhar to have told them that after Mr Bhutto-Zardari’s decision to refer the resignation matter to the party’s Central Executive Committee after agreeing to it on the PDM platform, it would be difficult for him to face the media and defend the party.

They claimed that Mr Khokhar’s resignation was not an outcome of any one particular incident and was a result of a number of events that took place since Senate elections in 2018 and his appointment as the spokesperson for the PPP chairman.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2020