Frustrated at fissures in MQM-P, Syed Sardar Ahmed quits party and politics

Former senior MQM-P parliamentarian Syed Sardar Ahmed resigned on Thursday from the party, bringing his political career to an end.

He had been serving as a political adviser on the party’s coordination committee. Aminul Haque, media communications head of the Muttahida-Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, confirmed receiving his resignation and said the party would persuade him to withdraw it.

Talking to The News, Ahmed reflected on the futile attempts by him and some of his political colleagues to unite the PIB Colony and Bahadurabad groups, led by Farooq Sattar and Amir Khan, respectively, in the MQM-P and said that he had been thinking about quitting for the past six months.

He said, “I have been in the politics for 15 years, have contested three elections, but I don’t see an atmosphere [for me] anymore. That’s why I didn’t participate in the general election [2018]. I think that now the younger generation should be given a chance.”

Ahmed is a retired bureaucrat and served as Karachi’s commissioner, Sindh’s chief secretary and chairman of the Port Qasim Authority among other prominent civil services jobs. The first election he fought from the MQM platform was in 2002 and then in 2008 and 2013.

Ahmed said he was discouraged by the splits in the party – MQM-London, MQM-P (PIBColony), MQM-P (Bahadurabad) – and counted MQM-Haqiqi t00. “It was one party once,” he added. “I hoped that they would reunite and put in my efforts but in vain. It’s all chaos.”

When asked what advice he would give to the younger generation – the Millennials who looked up to the MQM-P, he said they should come forward but added that “sadly” in the previous years they could not get an entry into the parliamentary politics owing to the problems in the party.

“Now they would be asked what group they belong to,” he said, describing the confusion that has overtaken after August 22, 2016, when the party apparently inevitably had to axe its founder Altaf Hussain’s role in the organisational and political matters due to the circumstances his controversial speeches had brought about.

He added, “Bascially, there is no real democracy in the country. What we need is participatory democracy but then whichever political party comes into power having majority thinks of it as aql-e-kul (ll-knowing) and do as it pleases. It does not take the opposition into confidence. So far, we have not been able to make meaningful political parties.”

Haque said Ahmed was respected in the party for his ideology, experience and knowledge and the leadership would try to convince him to withdraw from his resignation. “He has cited personal reasons for not being able to continue. We hope that we will succeed in bringing him back.”

The MQM is going through a difficult time. Its former parliamentarian Ali Raza Abidi, who quit in September, tweeted earlier on Wednesday about the party’s electoral history in respect of NA seats from Sindh: 13 in 1988, 15 in 1990, boycott in 1993, 12 in 1997, 13 in 2002, 25 in 2008, 24 in 2013 and seven in 2018.

He claimed that a four-year-long operation by law enforcement agencies, the launching of the Pak Sarzameen Party, the controversial sixth national census, alleged political engineering and the removal of Hussain led to the downfall of the party. However, some independent analysts cited an unsustainable system of governance, fascist and dictatorial rule, corruption and nepotism as reasons for the party’s decline.