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Tuesday March 19, 2024

PPP asks IGP to leave if he thinks he’s not subordinate to home minister

By our correspondents
May 27, 2017

Khuhro says next Sindh budget will have another development

package for Karachi

The ruling Pakistan Peoples Party in Sindh appears to be in no mood to tolerate AD Khowaja as the top cop of the province and has said he should leave the post of the inspector-general of police if he does not follow the orders of his boss or if he does not consider himself to be subordinate to the home minister and the home secretary.

Khowaja has been performing his duties on orders from the Sindh High Court, which has extended its interim order several times staying the IGP’s transfer to Islamabad. 

But the Sindh government is making things hard for the IGP. On Thursday, the recently reappointed home minister, Suhail Anwar Khan Siyal, claimed that the law and order situation of the province had been better before Khowaja was made the police chief, reported Geo News.

“However, the security situation of Sindh is better than that of the other provinces of the country,” he told the media after meeting with senior police officials.

Khowaja’s absence from the meeting fuelled the speculation that there might be some differences between the home minister and him. 

When Siyal was asked why the IGP was not invited to the meeting, he said he had divided the conference into two, adding that the police chief would be present in the next meeting, which was scheduled for the evening.

This March the government had surrendered the IGP’s services to the federal administration, but the move was blocked after rights activists petitioned for Khowaja in the Sindh High Court.

On May 17, Khowaja requested the SHC to vacate its interim order about his transfer because he had decided to voluntarily step down in the interest of the police and public order.

The court was hearing the petition of Karamat Ali and other rights activists and NGOs against the repeal of the Police Order 2002, purportedly through the Sindh (Repeal of the Police Order 2002 & Revival of the Police Act 1861) Act 2011, lack of implementation of the Police Order 2002 and the “illegal” action of the Sindh government with regard to the transfer of provincial police chief Khowaja.

Speaking at a press conference in Karachi on Friday, PPP Sindh President Nisar Ahmed Khuhro asked Khowaja to leave his post if he thought he was not subordinate to the home minister and the home secretary.

He said the provincial government’s budget for the next financial year would contain a special development package for Karachi similar to the one given to the city in the last year’s budget.

He said the federal government had again disappointed Sindh as it had ignored Karachi as far as the completion of mega development projects in the city was concerned.  

Khuhro noted that the proposed Karachi Circular Railway project had been made part of the China- Pakistan Economic Corridor after much difficulty.

He said the federal government had cracked down on a rally in Islamabad where farmers had assembled and rallied to expose “the reality of the federal budget”.

The senior PPP leader said the federal government had yet again resorted to an anti-people act by carrying out a crackdown on the farmers.

The federal government, he added, had failed to overcome the menace of power outages in the country despite the fact that it had doled out billions of rupees to its favourites in the power sector in the name of efforts to deal with the circular debt.

Khuhro was of the view that the Centre had been trying to suppress the voice of the masses by imposing a ban on social media.