KARACHI, March 26: Sindh Chief Minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim, has said that the opposition’s protest call in Sindh has failed and the people had not responded. “The people are not with the opposition but with us,” he said.

Talking to journalists at CM House on Monday, he said the people had rejected the opposition as they were fed up with change of faces and wanted the government to complete its tenure and solve their problems.

He accused the opposition of staging a “Natak” in the name of respect for the judiciary although Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during their governments had indulged in humiliating the courts.

He said in the rallies in Larkana, Sukkur and Mirpurkhas had no more than 500 to 800 people while in Hyderabad they were 1,200 and in Karachi about 3,000 participants only. “As the opposition has failed to turn the lawyers protest into “Musharraf Hatao Tehreek”, we have withdrawn our March 28 call for show of strength,” he added.

He said that in today’s rally, the PPP supporters were raising slogans for Benazir as prime minister while PML-N supporters were calling Nawaz Sharif as prime minister. He said this showed that they were not prepared to tolerate each other and the purpose of their calls was to create circumstances to promulgate emergency in the country so that elections should not be held.

About presidential elections the chief minister said the presidential elections would be held in the present assemblies because President General Pervez Musharraf’s tenure would end this year and election had to be held before expiry of the term.