By Abbas Jalbani
Daily Dawn, Karachi
ZED Ain is a diehard jiyala. His natural place is at a Pakistan People’s Party jalsa, raising deafening slogans of ‘Jeay Bhutto’.
He has been attending PPP rallies since Benazir Bhutto’s historic return from exile in 1986. For this purpose, he has travelled the length and breadth of the country and ignored his personal and family needs.
But he was in his native city, Karachi, on Oct 15 when he should have been in Hyderabad for the much-talked about PPP public meeting on the volatile issue of the new local bodies’ law.
Why? “Because it wasn’t a traditional PPP rally and had new and strange features to it,” he says.
His outburst, coupled with a lack of enthusiasm among many other party activists regarding participation in the event, gives credence to the allegations that the PPP used government machinery to make the Hyderabad rally successful.
“Every deputy commissioner of Sindh was given the task of arranging 25 air-conditioned buses to transport participants to Hyderabad and low-grade government servants were told to attend the rally or face the music,” says a journalist known for his connections with the bureaucracy.
Besides, the party leadership had reportedly approached tribal chiefs of the Kohistan area — the hilly tract along the Superhighway — to herd their ‘subjects’ to the rally to increase the headcount.
The phenomenon of obtaining the support of heavyweights was not confined to this rally. It seems the party leadership has adopted the strategy to lure ‘winnable’ feudal lords and tribal chieftains to the PPP.
It should be remembered that this was a party which had pitted a middle-class candidate against the mighty Pir Pagara in the 1988 general election; the man defeated the Pir by a wide margin.Read Full
Courtest: Daily Dawn, Karachi
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