I have not separated from PPP: Safdar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: Who owns the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is the question that was being asked in a legal battle in the court of law and also in the minds of the party workers, who were left in lurch mostly in Punjab.
The political observers see the PPP is being evaporated almost in the entire country, specially in central and northern Punjab as now it has been restricted to interior Sindh.
The legal battle to decide who owns PPP is being fought between two close aides of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto — Dr Safdar Abbassi and Nahid Khan, who have been sidelined in the PPP after BB’s martyrdom – and the PPP which is now headed by former President Asif Ali Zardari at the Islamabad High Court where the factions of PPP were contesting each other for the ownership of the party.
Talking to The News exclusively, PPP Workers President Dr Safdar Abbassi said it wasvery painful and agonising for the true and ideological workers of the PPP to witness the decline in popularity graph of a party that they and their martyred leaders nurtured with their blood. “A party that was the symbol of the federation of Pakistan has been confined to a few districts of Sindh only as in the 2013 elections wherein the PPP vote bank dropped from 37 percent to mere 15 percent while the recently held local bodies elections in the cantonments only demonstrate this fact,” he added.
He said three broad objectives to register the PPP Workers were to reorganise the party on true ideological and democratic lines, accountability of all those who are responsible for the present state of affairs in the PPP and to democratise and institutionalise the party by holding intra-party elections at all levels.
Abbassi said after failing to get justice from the courts and marathon sessions of debates, a party convention was held on October 21 2014 in Lahore, at Aiwan-e-Iqbal, which was attended by thousands of ideological workers. It was unanimously decided in the convention that while the legal battle for registration of PPP should be followed religiously, the party workers should be provided a platform to contest elections by registering PPP Workers. “But I want to make it clear that PPP Worker is neither a group nor a separate entity but it is formed in the same circumstances in which PPPP was registered for election purposes. We were PPP, we are PPP and we shall remain PPP and no one has the right or authority to take away this identity from us as poor masses of this country are the true heirs of Bhutto’s legacy,” he said.