Analysis: Sindh government on shaky ground

The tactics used to install a non-PPP government in Sindh has raised concerns about the stability of the multi-party coalition government of chief minister Ali Mohammed Maher.

Maher managed to obtain 89 votes in the Sindh Assembly after a long drawn out operation spearheaded by Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali and involving the Governor of Sindh, federal ministers and government officials, including those from the Presidency and the ISI.

It was a battle that those in power did not want to lose and, therefore, every method was applied to achieve victory. It did not bother the authors of the game-plan that the cost of this success was huge in terms of negation of democratic principles, promotion of defections and misuse of public money.

Nobody is going to believe Jamali or his ministers that the federal government played no role in the formation of the Sindh government. It would be better for their already battered image to just forget what happened in Sindh as repeating their unbelievable claim of non-interference in Sindh's affairs would do them more harm than good.

Jamali and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain's oft-repeated assurances that the majority party in Sindh would be allowed to try and form the government were sacrificed at the altar of political expediency.

Rather than allowing the majority PPP, which had 67 MPAs, to form the government, every effort was made to break the party and its members were tempted to defect. Five PPP MPAs and two from the normally disciplined MMA have already defected and more are on the way.

That Maher, who remained a PPP member like every known politician in Sindh, would be a weak chief minister is evident from the fact that his party, the PML-Q, has only 15 members in the 168-member Sindh Assembly. He would be at the mercy of not only Altaf Hussain's MQM, which has 41 MPAs, but also Imtiaz Ali Sheikh-Arbab Ghulam Rahim's SDA-led National Alliance which has 14 members and Pir Pagara's PML-F with 13 MPAs.

The fact that the chief minister does not belong to either of the two biggest parties in the Sindh Assembly, the PPPP and MQM, makes him inherently weak. The MQM, which is poised to extract the maximum price for propping up both Jamali's federal government and Maher's provincial regime, has been richly rewarded as the largest component of the multi-coalition in Sindh. Its nominee, Ishrat-ul-Ebad, who is reportedly wanted by the police, would become the Governor of Sindh and its members would get 55 per cent of the berths in the cabinet.

The rival Mohajir Qaumi Movement has already been targetted in a state-sponsored police action, its lone MPA Younis Khan is behind bars, and its only MNA, Mahmood Qureshi, and other top leaders are in hiding.

An operation by the Rangers and police opened up the so-called "No-Go Areas" that never existed if one were to believe Sindh Governor Mohammed Mian Soomro and President General Pervez Musharraf's interior minister Lt Gen (Retd) Moinuddin Haider and information minister Nisar Memon.

The man making all this happen is the ISI's Maj Gen Ehtisham Zamir, who was made famous by Maulana Fazlur Rahman's tongue-in-the-cheek reference to him in his maiden speech in the new National Assembly and is the son of one of the most humorous Urdu poets, the late Zamir Jaffery.

The goings-on in Sindh during recent weeks have been a huge embarrassment for all the political players in that province and their sponsors in Islamabad or abroad. Jamali, Shujaat Hussain and federal ministers Shaikh Rasheed Ahmad, Ghous Bakhsh Maher and Liquat Jatoi all became fully involved in the "Get Sindh Campaign" as they made the State Guest House, Karachi their operational headquarters and cut deals, offered carrots and brandished the stick to build up an unlikely coalition.

Governor Soomro obliged by inexcusably extending the time for filing nominations to prevent the election of MMA's Abdul Rahman Rajput as Deputy Speaker and enable the official nominee Rahila Tiwana, who incidentally was shouted down as "Loti" rather than "Lota" by the PPPP-MMA combine, to romp home.

Musharraf's decisive intervention, which apparently won the day for the PML-Q and its allies, became so obvious that it was well-nigh impossible to hide his role in shaping things.

The PPPP suffered yet more defections while its leaders Nisar Khuhro, Qaim Ali Shah and Makhdoom Amin Faheem wrangled over the choice for chief minister. Benazir Bhutto had to swallow the bitter pill when her party leaders opted for an alliance with the MMA, the six-party religious coalition that she had branded as a prototype of the Taliban while attempting to woo the U.S. The MMA too earned flak for joining hands with the PPPP after having accused its leadership of being secular, corrupt and opportunistic. Besides Makhdoom Amin Faheem, Pir Pagara and Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi also stood accused of promoting their son's candidature for the chief minister's office.