March on: Naseem Wali to visit Karachi to recruit members for ANP’s new faction

The general secretary will also be coming to Karachi before the month’s end to arrange the party set-up.

KARACHI: The Awami National Party-Wali (ANP-W), a faction of the ANP, will soon embark upon its activities in Sindh, particularly Karachi.

After the launch of the faction last month in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), ANP-W chief Begum Naseem Wali is coming to Karachi to recruit elders of the Pashtun community and ANP’s former workers and leaders. Wali had launched the faction after the ANP suffered defeat in the May 2013 elections and the move received much appreciation from former ANP workers.



“ANP activists call her their mother. When they call her their mother, they will definitely follow her,” said ANP-W general-secretary and politician Farid Toofan, who served as the general secretary of the ANP in K-P for years before he was expelled. He also remained president of the Pakhtun Student Federation (PkSF).

Toofan said that political workers dissatisfied with the present leadership of the ANP have contacted them from Karachi and Hyderabad and consented to help Wali. Toofan will make it to Karachi by the end of the month to arrange the party set-up in Karachi and Hyderabad. “Except for a few faces in the ANP Sindh chapter, all activists and leaders are in contact with us and will come with us,” said Toofan, adding that they have not formed a new party but revived the ANP.

Former ANP Sindh president Fazal Karim told The Express Tribune that a number of active Pashtun nationalists, who were once the part of the ANP, are willing to join the ANP-W. “Begum Wali is our mother. How we can refuse her if she asks us for something,” said Karim. He was optimistic about the popularity of the new faction in Sindh and said that hundreds of people will prefer it over the ANP. “The ANP had drifted away from the policies of Bacha Khan and Khan Abdul Wali Khan, which is why many people voted against it in the general elections,” he said, adding that under the supervision of Begum Naseem, the party will flourish.

Pakhtun Thinkers Forum chairperson and former president of the ANP Sindh Qasim Jan said that the ANP did the opposite of what Bacha Khan and Khan Abdul Wali Khan preached when the party was in power for five years in Karachi. Wali Khan had told the students that Karachi is a business city, he said. “If the city remains peaceful, you will live and run your businesses in peace,” said Jan, quoting Wali Khan’s address to a PkSF gathering in Karachi. “In the last five years, the policies of the ANP were completely against Wali Khan’s style of politics.”

Jan said that he has no interest in joining the Wali faction. “The new faction will help unite the Pashtun community. It had to be settled what was being done in Karachi under the guise of the ANP.”

ANP organising committee chairperson advocate Altaf Khan said that the people who had already left the ANP were joining the ANP-W and refuted the news that majority of the present ANP activists and leaders will be leaving. “Our intra-party elections are underway,” he said, adding that, in the past, when Ajmal Khattak and Afzal Khan Lala quit the party, a number party activists first followed them but later returned to the party. Calling Toofan and Karim ‘political orphans’, Altaf said that they have switched a number parties and have no political wisdom. “We respect Begum Wali as our mother and will not utter a word no matter what she says.”

“It would have been fruitful if Mor Bibi (Wali) had raised her concerns when we were in the government.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 14^th, 2014.