A leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) has termed the agreement recently signed by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) to form a coalition government “the script of a comic play”.
In a statement issued for the media on Monday, PPP Sindh General Secretary Waqar Mehdi said the PTI Karachi chief’s recent controversial statement had let the cat out of the bag. Mehdi expressed surprise that on the one hand the MQM-P had been protesting against alleged rigging in the July 25 general elections, but on the other, the party had signed a memorandum of understanding to become a part of the coalition government, whose existence was made possible by the same supposedly fixed polls.
The PPP leader said the agreement is meant only to fool the people of Karachi, adding that the MQM is no longer the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, but rather the ‘Maal Qaboo Movement’ (a movement to earn money through illicit means).
“Those who made a mockery of the mandate of the people of Karachi for the past three decades have this time sold off their mandate at a throwaway price,” he said, adding that the PTI’s candidates who had won national and provincial assembly seats in Karachi were surprised at their own victory.
Mehdi said that while signing the agreement to form a coalition government, the PTI had betrayed the sacrifice rendered by party leader Zahra Shahid Hussain five years ago. “The murderers of Zahra Shahid seem to have been adopted by the Tehreek-e-Insaf.”
Addressing a news conference on Sunday, PTI Karachi President Firdous Shamim Naqvi had claimed that his party continues to stand by all the allegations it has levelled against the MQM in the past.
Naqvi said the PTI felt compelled to approach the MQM for signing the agreement to secure the numerical strength (172 MNAs) it requires in the incoming National Assembly to get PTI Chairman Imran Khan elected as the next prime minister of the country.
He said that apart from this requirement, the PTI has no other special leaning towards the MQM. He was of the view that the MQM performed poorly in the elections because of the alleged misdeeds of the party’s city mayor.
The PTI’s city chief was later censured by other senior party leaders over his controversial statement because it could strain the relations between the two parties before the forming of the coalition government.
In a statement issued on Saturday, Taj Haider, who headed the PPP’s election cell for last month’s polls, expressed concerns over the MQM-P joining hands with the political forces that “deprived the people of Karachi of their right to vote”.
Haider said the PTI-MQM agreement consists of several points addressing the long-standing issues in Sindh’s urban centres that the MQM-P has struggled for in the past, and calls on both political parties to actively seek solutions to these problems and take definitive steps to resolve them.
He said that under the agreement a university would be established in Hyderabad, while the PTI has failed to fulfil a similar promise during their five-year tenure in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The agreement was signed by the people who for the last three decades kept youngsters away from pens and books and instead handed them Kalashnikovs, he added.
“It can’t be denied that it was during the PPP government that the University of Sindh was set up, which has the capacity to enrol 30,000 students in Hyderabad,” he claimed. He mentioned that the PPP also built engineering, medical and agriculture universities and even elevated the Government College Hyderabad to university.
He said the agreement was signed in haste forgetting the fact that several points mentioned in it come under the domain of the provincial government; therefore, only the Sindh Assembly can introduce such legislations.
“The MQM should have negotiated with the PPP. It seems that the agreement has been signed at the behest of forces that don’t give any importance to the provincial powers.”