‘Sindh CM and even mayor of Hyderabad will be from PTI’

All leaders who kept championing democracy were reared in dictatorships, says Haleem Adil Sheikh

HYDERABAD: Marking 23rd founding day of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) at a public meeting in Hyderabad on Friday night, the party's provincial leadership asserted with certitude that the party will elect its chief minister in Sindh after the next elections. "The Sindh CM and even the mayor of Hyderabad will be from the PTI," the party's acting Sindh President Haleem Adil Sheikh assured a charged crowd of supporters, who gathered at the event at Bagh-e-Mustafa ground in Latifabad.

"We will contest the next elections on our party symbol [bat] and we won't form an electoral alliance". He lambasted Pakistan Peoples Party's (PPP) Sindh government for corruption and lack of capability saying that half of the provincial cabinet's ministers, including the CM, were implicated in the cases of National Accountability Bureau.

He claimed that Prime Minister Imran Khan was the only public leader while the rest were reared in the nurseries of the dictatorships, including PPP's founding leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz's (PML-N) Nawaz Sharif. "All the leaders who kept championing the cause of democracy were reared in dictatorships".

He said that the PPP, during its 11 years of consecutive rule in Sindh, failed to provide clean drinking water to the citizens of even the urban areas adding that the poor drainage system also spoke volumes of corruption and ineptitude. He asked the people of Sindh to jump on the bandwagon of change if they wanted to get rid of government-created miseries in their lives.

Sheikh shot back at the criticism of Khan by PPP Sindh's President Nisar Ahmed Khuhro. "The people know that you were disqualified from contesting the general elections in 2018 because you hid your marriage".

The opposition leader in Sindh Assembly, Firdous Shamim Naqvi, asked PPP's Co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari to take lesson from the conviction of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He said that like Zardari, Sharif was also under the wrong impression that the courts would not convict him.

The PTI Hyderabad division's President Khawand Bux Jahejo said that if the PTI sided with Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan to carve out a new province in Sindh, he will be the first to quit the party. He tried to dispel the perception that his party was part of such a plan for dividing the province.

The PTI MNA Jai Prakash, MPA Jamal Siddiqui, Dr Mustansar Billah and other party leaders also spoke.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2019.