KARACHI: Governor Sindh Ishratul Ibad Khan has reportedly faxed his resignation to the President House, according to various TV news channels.

Ishrat, belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), was seen at the Karachi airport to be leaving for Dubai late on Friday amid protests by the party against the ongoing operation in the provincial capital.

The operation which the MQM has dubbed as one-sided action against its office bearers is being conducted by the Sindh government.

The most significant arrest during the action has been that of former MQM lawmaker Nadeem Hashmi, following which urban areas of Sindh, including Hyderabad and Karachi, observed a shutdown earlier on Wednesday.

Hashmi was later sent on week-long physical remand by an ATC in Karachi.

Ibad, who was appointed to the post on Dec 27, 2002, is also the longest-serving governor of the province.

In his more than a decade long time at the governor house, this is not the first instance when the MQM leader has tendered his resignation. He has previously resigned from the position and then withdrawn his resignation on insistence of his party’s chief Altaf Hussain.

Upon persuasion by former president Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – the former coalition partners of MQM — Hussain, on more than one occasion, advised Ibad to take back his resignation.

In June 2011 and again in February this year, he tendered his resignation hours after the MQM pulled out of the ruling coalition in the province and at the centre in protest that its ‘reservations’ were not being addressed by the PPP.

On both counts, Hussain asked the governor to reconsider his decision in the light of requests made by the business community, industrialists, religious scholars and people belonging to different spheres of life.

Biographical information

Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad Khan, who was appointed on Dec 27, 2002, is the longest-serving governor of the province.

Born on March 2, 1963, Dr Ibad graduated from the Dow Medical College. He was said to be interested in politics from his days as a student and subsequently emerged as a prominent leader of the then All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation, a student wing of the then Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM).

After his graduation from DMC, Ibad headed the party’s medical aid committee and gradually became a front-rank MQM figure.

He was the youngest minister in the Sindh cabinet in the early 1990s, holding the portfolios of housing and town planning. Ibad was also assigned the additional charge of environment and public health engineering departments.

In 1993, he departed for London where he was granted political asylum. He was appointed the governor of Sindh upon his return from the UK. Ibad is the youngest and longest-serving governor Sindh has ever had.

He is married, with two sons and two daughters.