Three days after a Hyderabad lawmaker quit the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P), two more top-tier office-bearers of the party as well as 15 other members followed suit on Wednesday, citing the infighting between the PIB and Bahadurabad factions as their reason for jumping ship.
MNA Muzammil Qureshi and 15 other like-minded members joined the Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP), while Shabbir Qaimkhani, a member of the Bahadurabad group’s coordination committee, is yet to sign up to another party.
Since March 28, two days after the Election Commission of Pakistan decided in favour of the Bahadurabad faction and removed Dr Farooq Sattar as the MQM-P chief, the party has lost six of its prominent members: three MNAs, two MPAs and a top organisational person.
And the party is likely to lose more members in the coming days. Keeping the situation in view, the PIB and Bahadurabad groups, spearheaded by Sattar and Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui respectively, have agreed to demonstrate flexibility and sit together to talk, a senior MQM-P leader has claimed.
He said Sattar and Siddiqui met on Tuesday at the residence of a senior legislator of the party who is also the leading mediator, adding that another meeting is expected sometime on Wednesday.
Confirming the reports of the meeting, MQM-P Bahadurabad faction leader Aminul Haque said: “The next 48 hours are crucial.” On behalf of his group, he said they are open for a reunion because it is in the best interest of the party.
He, however, remarked that such switches will not cause any harm to the party because they have happened in the past to them as well as to other political parties. “Soon, though, voters and supporters of the party will hear good news,” he said, hinting at the end of the split.
‘Everyone upset by split’
Addressing a news conference at the PSP headquarters, the Pakistan House, MNA Muzammil Qureshi said: “I had hoped that things will get better after August 22 [2016]. Unfortunately, they did not, and on February 5 a struggle for power and personal gains within the party surfaced.”
He said office-bearers and workers alike were disappointed with the infighting that apparently stemmed from Kamran Tessori’s nomination as party senator. He said the MQM-P has changed a lot. “The female party workers were highly respected, but in this fiasco even they were disgraced and discussed in public.”
He opined that the MQM-P has put the “real” issues on the back burner and no one is talking about them. He said he and his companions were told that they would lose by joining the PSP. “Yet we joined it and will work for redressing the balance.”
Talking about his previous impression of the PSP, he said: “I thought that I would be handed down a script to read from during the news conference. On the contrary, Anis Kaimkhani asked me to speak from the heart.”
Qureshi asked Sattar to join the PSP and said that everyone here respects him. He also asked the MQM workers who are disappointed with the leadership to come forward and resume their political struggle for people’s rights rather than staying at home and doing nothing.
Kaimkhani again invited Sattar and Siddiqui to his party and said they should end their “romance” with the MQM’s electoral symbol of kite. “You should instead focus on the people of Karachi who are deprived of their basic necessities.”
He said the people of urban centres in Sindh are being subjected to injustices through the controversial population census and a manipulative delimitation. He added that their lives have become miserable because 10 to 12 hours of load-shedding a day in this hot weather, and they also face difficulties in obtaining their ID cards from NADRA.
‘Whither MQM principles?’
Shabbir Qaimkhani announced his resignation from the MQM-P in an audio message. He said he was ending his 33-year-long association with the party with a heavy heart because it was no more the same party whose discipline once used to be exemplary.
“I am so much depressed with the disintegration of the party within these two months,” he said, adding that though the conflict seems to have occurred on a Senate ticket, it was actually the issue of power with the convener, among others.
He said it would be unjust to blame a single person for the whole fiasco, adding that fairly speaking, everyone in the leadership was responsible for this.
“For the first time in the history of the party, there were two separate foundation day gatherings,” he said, adding that the party leaders have forgotten the principles laid down in the party literature.