KARACHI: Pak Sarzameen Party chairman Syed Mustafa Kamal on Saturday rejected the appointment of political administrators by the Pakistan Peoples Party government in Sindh and announced that his party would launch an anti-government campaign after Ashura.

Speaking at a press conference here at his party’s Pakistan House headquarters, Mr Kamal lashed out at the PPP government for the appointment of a political administrator in Karachi and saw it as an attempt to delay the local government elections.

In a thinly veiled reference to newly appointed Karachi Administrator Murtaza Wahab, he said that without any justified constitutional, legal and moral reason the PPP had appointed its own political workers as administrators of Karachi and Hyderabad.

“What the PPP has been doing in the name of democracy in Sindh for the last 13 years is highly condemnable,” he said. “The PPP has practically converted Sindh into a Sindhudesh and [Asif Ali] Zardari’s fiefdom. [It seems] people from the rest of the country will soon need a visa to enter Sindh.”

He said that if the appointment of a political administrator, instead of holding local government election, was the right thing to do then there was no need to hold general elections in the country and administrators should be appointed after completion of tenure of the prime minister and chief ministers.

‘The PPP has practically converted Sindh into Zardari’s fiefdom’

Accompanied by PSP president Anis Kaimkhani and others, he asked that why not the whole country and rest of Sindh get political administrators to run the affairs of their respective governments if the appointment of a political personality as administrator of Karachi was legitimate.

Mr Kamal said that it was because of the negative and “bigoted” tactics of the PPP and other so-called democratic parties that people distributed sweets whenever undemocratic forces took power.

He said the PSP would take to the streets against the Sindh government after 10th of Muharram.

“When we can fight and eliminate the presence of [Indian intelligence agency] RAW from Karachi, we can also fight the PPP-led prejudiced provincial government,” he said.

Mohajir unity

Mr Kamal, who was Karachi mayor from 2005 to 2010 from the platform of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, made it clear that he was not willing to forge an alliance with any party for the sake of only Mohajir politics.

“Those people who say that Mohajirs should unite [on one platform] should tell whether they want Mohajirs and people of other ethnic backgrounds to be killed in Kati Pahari, Lyari, Chakra Goth, Al-Asif Square, Liaquatabad, New Karachi and other areas,” said Mr Kamal.

He said it was the “greatest strength of the PSP” that it talked about Mohajirs without making Sindhis, Baloch, Pakhtuns, Punjabis their enemy.

He said the biggest beneficiary of ethnic politics in Karachi was the PPP because such politics gave it a chance to unite its core base on the basis of “hatred and prejudice” instead of its performance.

The PSP chief said it was unfortunate that Sindhi intellectuals and Sindhi nationalists had never raised their voice against the “atrocities and injustices” committed by the PPP government against the people of urban Sindh.

He said the PPP had given 250,000 government jobs to people of rural Sindh in violation of the agreed 60:40 urban-rural quota by depriving people of Karachi and Hyderabad, but no Sindhi intellectual and nationalist raised their voice over this grave injustice.

Criticising the selective implementation of lockdown, he said Karachi had become a victim of the PPP and “there is no doubt among the people that the PPP is the enemy of Karachi and the Mohajir community”.

He said the PPP’s actions were deepening the sense of alienation against the state.

Published in Dawn, August 8th, 2021