PML-N fails to impact Karachi turmoil

The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has failed to make its presence felt on the political horizon as far as the grim Karachi situation is concerned.

The PML-N leaders this correspondent talked to conceded that Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s just concluded three-day visit to Karachi, which was intended to heal the wounds of its people, was too belated.

“Given our political standing and relevance, we have not paid the needed heed to Karachi when it was engulfed by worst violence with the government being busy playing tricks to gain political mileage and trying to expand its political base,” one PML-N leader said on condition of anonymity.

As per his practice being followed over the past several years, PML-N President Nawaz Sharif is spending the last ten days of the Ramazan in Saudi Arabia. Even when he was in Pakistan, he did not take time out to pay a visit to Karachi with the purpose of instilling a sense of urgency and emergency in the government to hurry up and rectify the deteriorating situation.

The PML-N leader said that Shahbaz Sharif’s activities in Karachi on the last day, which even otherwise were not very elaborately politically planned, were dampened by the sensational kidnapping of slain Punjab governor Salman Taseer’s son and he rushed back to Lahore. He met businessmen, entrepreneurs and intellectuals, and hoped to change that the PML-N was not popular in Karachi, acknowledging that it was not able to play an active role in Sindh.

He admitted that despite the unparalleled damage being done to Pakistan’s economy by the anarchy in Karachi, the PML-N simply left it to the ruling coalition to handle and bring the situation under control. “I believe we should have built up pressure on the government. This is what we being in the opposition are supposed to do. Had we done so, the government would not have acted the way it had since long.”

Another PML-N stalwart said that if the central party leadership avoided going to Karachi again and again during its difficult time to tell its people that it feels for them, the performance of its Sindh chapter has been too dismal in this regard. Elderly Leaguer Syed Ghous Ali Shah, who has been mainly managing (or mismanaging) the PML-N in Sindh has of late been displeased with the Sharif brothers due to its reorganization in Sindh.

The PML-N leader said that it was of course unsettling for a major political party like his to be totally ignored in the context of the Karachi situation. “We have faced constant embarrassment by repeatedly hearing that there are only three stakeholders in Karachi - Muttahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP). No doubt, their representatives were elected from the Sindh metropolis in the last elections, but this doesn’t mean that the PML-N, Jamaat-e-Islami, Sunni Tehrik, MQM-H etc. don’t have any say there. They are also relevant players.”

While the PML-N took the back seat with the eruption of increased violence in Karachi over the past few months, the Jamaat-e-Islami continues to undertake activities there despite having been tremendously marginalized by the MQM.

The PML-N leader said that as Nawaz Sharif would return from Saudi Arabia early next month, the party would devise a policy for its activities in the Sindh including Karachi. “In any case, we are going to field our candidates for a number of national and provincial constituencies of Sindh in the next general elections.”

No matter the PML-N nominees win or lose, their participation will show that the party is seriously treating Sindh like other areas of Pakistan in the electoral contest, he said. The PML-N would also hold its provincial elections in September. After that Nawaz Sharif will visit all the provinces with his focus being on Sindh, the PML-N leader said.