KARACHI: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) and the ruling Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) went a step forward on Wednesday to implement the “charter of rights” the two parties had signed last year to address the opposition party’s concerns.

The MQM had serious reservations against “unjustified delimitation, fake voters’ list and less count of population in the National Census 2017”.

The fresh rapprochement came days after the MQM-P announced postponement of their planned sit-in on Fawara Chowk on the ‘request’ of authorities amid security concerns for the Pakistan International Maritime Expo and Conference and 8th Multinational Maritime Exercise Aman-2023.

A delegation of PPP leaders led by local government minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah visited the MQM-P temporary headquarters in Bahadurabad and held talks with its leaders, including Khalid Maqbool Siddiqi, Farooq Sattar, Mustafa Kamal and Faisal Subzwari.

The two sides while interacting with media after the meeting sounded confident about the prospects of their fresh engagements saying that soon issues mainly related with the delimitation would be resolved.

Delegation of ruling party visits Muttahida’s head office

“It has been decided that the Sindh government will issue a letter for new union committees in Karachi,” said Mr Kamal of the MQM-P.

“It’s totally the domain of the provincial government. After the Sindh government had withdrawn the notification on delimitation before the local bodies’ polls on January 15, the Election Commission of Pakistan should have started the process of fresh delimitation but it went ahead for voting. That’s why we didn’t see those polls legal and we decided to boycott the process.”

He said the two sides had discussed different issues in the meeting and both sides were hopeful that things were moving towards logically with consensus.

However, he made it clear that the fresh decision would not affect its principled stance to gear up its protest campaign for its demands.

The provincial minister Shah seconded the thoughts of MQM-P leaders and said that both sides were holding talks to remove differences and despite being opposition party, the PPP wanted to address all grievances of the MQM-P for better working relationship.

“The only objective of this exercise, including talks, meetings and proposals, is to bring consensus on key issues to remove all differences. The political parties always have differences but it when it comes to good governance, we believe that it’s our duty to take all political forces onboard for consensual opinion on key issues,” he said.

Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2023