KARACHI, Feb 28: The Pakistan People’s Party has claimed that General Pervez Musharraf and his associates were systematically involving government employees in politics and this was bound to shatter people’s aspiration of seeing democracy to prevail in the country.

Commenting on the public meeting addressed by General Musharraf in Larkana, PPP Sindh chief Syed Qaim Ali Shah in a statement here on Wednesday described the ‘Larkana Darbar’ of government employees as ‘a peculiar event in the history of Pakistan’ where, he said, “the dictatorial forces had to draw government employees from across Sindh to portray it as a public meeting.”

He claimed that buses were arranged to collect government employees right from as a far-flung area as Nangarparkar bordering India to Kharo Chhan in Thatta to bring them to the venue of the Darbar to make people believe that General Musharraf and his loyal politicians enjoyed massive support in public.

“Deploying over 10,000 security forces and bringing a few thousand government employees to Larkana for show suggests that the man who is wielding a gun would fall off the stage the minute he dropped his gun,” he observed.

He further observed that thousands of private vehicles had been snatched from their owners by the police for the purpose of bringing participants of the Darbar to the venue creating a shortage of transport means. As a result, millions of passengers had to wait for hours at various bus stops.

The PPP leader said “relationship of deception between General Musharraf and his associates lays bare upon seeing him sitting on stage with people like the one who had attempted to kill women parliamentarians in Kotri by-elections.”

He deplored that hundreds of millions of rupees from the country’s exchequer were spent on General Musharraf’s visit to Sindh, adding that the general was emerging as one of the most expensive figures in terms of security arrangements for his movement.