Muzaffar Said of JI formally joins PPP in Lower Dir

TIMERGARA: Former provincial finance minister and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) leader Muzaffar Said on Monday formally joined Pakistan People’s Party at a workers’ convention at the residence of PPP Lower Dir president and former provincial minister Nawabzada Mehmood Zeb Khan.

PPP central and provincial leaders, former chairman of Senate Nayyar Hussain Bukhari, provincial president Humayun Khan, Aijaz Durrani and a large number of PPP workers were present on the occasion.

It was quite unimaginable for JI workers in Lower Dir that their popular leader, who had been in this party since his college days and who had been elected twice to the provincial assembly on JI ticket and once given the portfolio of the provincial minister, would say good-bye to the party.

Speaking on the occasion, Muzaffar Said thanked PPP workers for according a warm welcome to him in the party. “Since long, I was highly impressed by ZA Bhutto’s ideology and that was why when I was a student in 1993, I wrote my thesis on ‘role of ZA Bhutto’s reforms in Pakistan’,” he said.

"I have joined PPP as a worker, not as a leader, and I will always work for the welfare of the poor people,” he said, adding that many of his supporters would also join PPP soon. Speaking on the occasion, the PPP leaders welcomed Muzaffar Said to the party and hoped his joining would make the party strong in Lower Dir.

It may be mentioned here that some JI workers had openly opposed Muzaffar Said during the general elections of 2018 and according to insiders, he had been demanding strict disciplinary action against those party workers who played a role in his defeat in the 2018 elections.

PPP leader Akhunzada Chattan, while speaking on the occasion, said that the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) public gathering in Peshawar on November 22 would prove a referendum against what he called the “selected” government.

He asked PPP workers to participate in gathering in Peshawar as he said the PPP had always been struggling for supremacy of the Constitution.