HYDERABAD, April 6: Most Sindhi nationalist parties, including the Sindh Taraqqi Pasand Party and the Jeay Sindh National Party, described the Pakistan People’s Party’s decision to give Muttahida Qaumi Movement a share in power as an insult to people’s mandate, with the exception of Sindh United Party, which is the only party supporting PPP’s reconciliatory overtures.

The STP’s central committee, which met on Saturday, accused the PPP of going back on its promises and said that the party walked into a trap laid by President Pervez Musharraf.

The meeting said that the PPP government had already started deviating from its policies despite the fact that it had not yet attained full powers. The statements of Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar about Pervez Musharraf and those attributed to federal Minister for Water and Power Raja Pervez Ashraf about dams were proofs enough, it observed.

The meeting was highly critical of the PPP leadership’s visit to 90, the MQM headquarters, and said that the party’s seeking forgiveness from “terrorists” and offering them ministries, would do great harm to the democratic process.

Mr Ashraf’s statement was an insult to the three provincial assemblies, which had unanimously adopted resolutions against the mega water projects, the meeting said, urging the party to explain its stand on dams.

The meeting reminded the party of its promises and said the party should form a high-level judicial commission to probe into May 12, Oct 18 and Nishtar Park tragedies and award punishments to the culprits, end army operation in Balochistan and release Sardar Akhtar Mengal, Dr Safdar Sarki and all the other political prisoners.

The chairman of Jeay Sindh National Party Agha Shamshad Mughal and other party leaders demanded at a news conference at the press club on Sunday that the PPP should rescind its decision on sharing power with MQM and said that the party had bargained over Sindhis’ blood at 90.

Mr Mughal said that his party was not against the Urdu-speaking people as the 90 and the Urdu-speaking people were two distinct and separate entities. One could not become a Sindhi simply by wearing Ajrak or a Sindhi cap, he asserted.

He criticised Mr Zardari’s 90 visit and said: “No one including Mr Zardari had the right to forget or forgive the murders of Sindhis except the heirs of the deceased”.

The Sindh United Party is the lone voice of praise for what it terms rapprochement between the PPP and the MQM. The party’s chairman Syed Jalal Mehmood Shah said at a workers convention and later talking to journalists on Sunday that if the PPP-MQM marriage helped the SUP programme the party would support it.

He predicted that the PPP-PML-N coalition would prove short-lived as it was not a ‘transformation’ of power but ‘power-sharing’ between military and political forces.

If the fresh moves about bridging the gulf between PPP and MQM was meant to lend support to the president then the SUP would naturally oppose it, he said.

Mr Shah condemned attack on Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim and called for an end to such kind of attitude.