ISLAMABAD, Nov 3: The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) believes that in a replay of the Balochistan scenario, the Sindh government has also lost “moral and constitutional authority” to rule the province after the Supreme Court’s interim order in the Karachi law and order case.

The party drew parallels between the court’s verdict on the law and order situation in Balochistan and the interim order issued on Saturday in the case related to target killings and extortion in Karachi.

However, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) laughed off the PML-N’s stance, arguing that there was no similarity in the two cases because a city cannot be compared with a province.

“If it fails to improve law and order in Karachi then the SC decision in the Balochistan case will have to be applied on the Sindh government as well,” PML-N’s deputy secretary general Ahsan Iqbal said on Saturday.

Talking to Dawn, he said the spirit of the court orders in both cases was the same and “if the government in Balochistan has no authority to rule then there is no reason for the Sindh government to stay in power if it fails to protect the citizens”.

He said the orders had proved that there was no writ of the government in Balochistan and same was the case in Karachi where target killings had become an order of the day.

However, Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said that unlike Balochistan Karachi was just a city where the law and order situation had been created because of the presence of various groups such as land mafia, drug mafia, Al Qaeda and Taliban.

He said not only the court, but the PPP, the media, the government and everyone else was concerned about the Karachi situation since it was the main commercial hub of the country.

Mr Kaira, who is also the PPP information secretary, said the Balochistan issue was entirely different from that of Karachi and the PML-N was trying to establish the relationship between them only for point scoring.

The minister said the PPP believed that the SC’s verdict in the Balochistan case was also inappropriate because the courts had no powers to establish or remove governments.

“It is only with the people’s mandate that a government can come into existence and fall,” he said.

Mr Iqbal, the PML-N leader, said the business community of Karachi had been protesting against the extortionist mafia for several months but the government had remained unmoved. “It appears there is no government in Sindh,” he said.

He alleged that the extortionists were operating freely in Karachi under the patronage of the provincial government and “all the coalition parties are partners in the crime”.

Another PML-N leader from Karachi, Nehal Hashmi, alleged in a statement that the Sindh government had become a “symbol of corruption, looting, non-transparency and favouritism”.