The backbencher: Ghost of Kalabagh Dam lingers in the house

PPP MPAs expect rally on December 27 to be among the biggest ever held in Pakistan.

KARACHI: The Pakistan Peoples Party, forever under attack for either using or abusing the ‘Sindh card’ or ‘selling out Sindh’, turned the provincial assembly session into a melee of accusations and counter-accusations for the second day in a row.

The ghost of Kalabagh Dam rattled around in the Sindh Assembly, but one could presume that even the ghost got fed up and went for a nap.

The PPP MPAs offered a history lesson on the defensive after opposition leaders accused the party on Thursday of being all talk and no action and then began yelling at the Pakistan Muslim League- Functional MPAs for having made the allegations.

Egged on by his cabinet colleagues Sharjeel Inam Memon and Murad Ali Shah, PPP’s Zahid Bhurgari launched into a tirade against the PML-F while Memon didn’t help matters by calling PML-F MPA Nusrat Seher Abbasi out for her choice of words on Thursday.

There were inflammatory quotes a minute. PPP’s Makhdoom Jamil-uz-Zaman criticised the Lahore High Court judge, Humera Alwani led chants of ‘shame shame’ against former minister Nisar Memon and his daughter while, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s Marvi Memon and Speaker Nisar Ahmed Khuhro tried to calm the indignant PML-F MPAs with ‘bardasht, bardasht’.

One wonders why, exactly, the PPP is so miffed at the Pir Pagara-led party that recently called it quits with the coalition. As much as the PPP seems to be enjoying levelling allegations against the PML-F, they’ll soon realise that people are laughing at them, not with them.

But for now, the PPP in Sindh has other issues to tackle, including what it claims will be the “one of the largest rallies ever organised in Pakistan.” This April, at the death anniversary of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari was nowhere to be seen in Garhi Khuda Bux.



One heard he was there, but the doors of the Bhutto family mausoleum were closed when he arrived and the hundreds waiting outside weren’t able to catch a glimpse of him. On December 27, the chairperson of the PPP is set to speak...”...in Urdu!” MPA Humera Alwani told The Express Tribune.

“There are divisional meetings of the party going on and we are aiming for 500,000 to 1,000,000 people to attend the rally,” she said. “The female MPAs, in particular, have been tasked with this.”

Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, she said, is expected to “unveil the party manifesto and the elections strategy” in his speech.

While one does not look forward to the jalsa arithmetic that will be used after the December 27 rally to calculate whether it was a million, 10 million, or whether the crowd could be seen from the moon -  for now, the PPP is all set to board the Bilawal Express, as this is their winning ticket for the elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2012.