‘Dear PM’: Respect G-B’s right to self-rule, says PPP

Khursheed Shah asks Nawaz to release recently-announced funds for region.

GILGIT: National Assembly Opposition Leader Khursheed Shah has asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to respect Gilgit-Baltistan’s right to self-rule as introduced by the Pakistan Peoples Party through a governance order in 2009.

“Mr Prime Minister, you should not make a mockery of G-B’s [right to] self-rule,” Shah stressed while talking to journalists late Sunday night in Gilgit.

In addition to Khursheed Shah, former federal information minister Qamar Zaman Kaira, Shehla Raza and Afzal Nadim Chand visited G-B to kick off PPP’s election campaign for legislative assembly polls scheduled for June 8. They also met various delegations and attended public meetings held in Gilgit and Skardu.



“The governance order says that the regional governor should be a local and that the G-B Council will have two advisers, but you haven’t even appointed one despite having been the prime minister for more than two years,” Shah reminded Nawaz. He asked the PM to release funds announced for the region during his recent visit with the same urgency he exercised for the Metro Bus project.

Kaira, who served as the first governor of G-B in 2009, said drawing a comparison between him and Barjees Tahir was illogical. He said he took on the responsibility when the system was new and local representatives were comparatively inexperienced. “I took up the responsibility to help the system, initially, but passed it on to the locals immediately after elections.”

Kaira said G-B was given representation in the Council of Common Interest (CCI) because it had no representation in Parliament. However, he said the incumbent federal government has deprived G-B of that by not convening a meeting of the CCI for a long time.

Moreover, he said the PPP government gave the region an “identity by changing its name from Northern Areas to Gilgit-Baltistan”.

Kaira also took a jibe at PPP members who defected to PML-N recently, saying people would reject them in the upcoming polls. “There are disloyal people in every party, but that does not mean PPP will lose the elections.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2015.