Leading ladies: Going for a hat-trick

Samina Khalid Ghurki pledges to complete development she started in last term .

LAHORE:

Samina Khalid Ghurki, former federal minister and the Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians candidate for NA-130, leaves her house in her 2011 model SUV to visit villages in her constituency.

Armed guards follow in a Hilux and escort her to the stage at corner meetings, such as one at Brahmanabad village near the BRB Canal this last week. This correspondent accompanied her to Brahmanabad, as well as to a meeting at a lumberdar’s dera in the nearby Mandayala Pind off Burki Road.

Brahmanabad and Mandayala Pind are accessible only by a three-kilometre potholed road. The villages were hooked up to the electric grid only last year, and several area remain without power.

At Brahmanabad, she takes to the podium with a smile, a confident demeanour and several rose garlands around her neck. She speaks in Punjabi and starts with the most pressing issue for the residents of this village: the lack of gas connections.

Ghurki tells her constituents that the major challenge to providing utilities had been getting the supply lines there, and this task she had achieved. The next phase is distribution, she says.

She says other big challenges in the constituency are building a high school for girls and healthcare infrastructure. The villages have a primary school for girls and a high school for boys. There is no hospital, but a small dispensary with a family health clinic.

Ghukri promises to build carpeted roads to the villages and to upgrade primary schools to middle and middle to high schools. “I am aware of every pothole on the roads in my area,” she later tells The Express Tribune.

Some voters in the area are sceptical of her promises, saying that she made similar ones in her previous campaign and failed to achieve the goals in her five years in the National Assembly.

But everyone agrees that she is always accessible and sympathetic to her constituents’ needs, that there are few politicians, if any, who spend as much time among them as she.

NA-130, which consists of 12-and-a-half union councils and borders India, is the largest constituency in Lahore with some 350,000 voters.

Ghurki’s political career began in 2002 when her husband and brothers-in-law were stopped from running as they did not have university degrees. This 1976 Lahore College for Women graduate is now the PPP Lahore president. A widow and a mother of four, Ghurki says she misses her husband, former MNA Khalid Ghurki, the most when out among his supporters, who now vote for her.

She won comfortably in the 2008 elections, getting 44,692 votes of the total 98,851 votes cast. In 2002, she had polled around 46,000 votes. She says she is confident of winning again on May 11.

She says her popularity and the PPP’s good reputation in the area will also help her running mate at PP-158, former PML-Q member Naveed Ashiq Diyal, win his Punjab Assembly seat.

Ghurki says she is opposed to development that displaces people. There is no gain, she says, in building roads and settling new populations at the cost of others. Many such projects waste agriculture land, she adds.

Education, health and women’s affairs are key areas of her legislative interest, she says. Ghurki was one of nine women MPs from Pakistan who signed the UNIFEM’s ‘Say no to violence against women’ campaign in New York last year.

She says her party’s biggest failing has been its failure to tell people about the good works it has done. It should have started the election campaign a little earlier, she adds.

In an earlier article, Khalid Ghurki was mistakenly written as former MPA. We regret the error.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 5^th, 2013.