Ibad to be sworn in as Sindh governor

The nominee of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) will take the oath of office as Governor of Sindh province today, even as a hardline Sindhi nationalist group slammed President Gen. Pervez Musha-rraf's choice.

The government has issued a notification of Ishratul Ibad's appointment as governor of Sindh province where the ruling Pakistan Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam leads a minority government with the support of the MQM. The resignation of Governor Sindh Mian Moham-med Soomro has been accepted, government officials said.

Ibad, who returned from self-imposed exile in London after almost 10 years, will take the oath this afternoon at the colonial-era Governor House. He will come to the MQM headquarters, Nine-zero, from the airport, said Nasreen Jalil, a senior MQM leader. From there, he will go to the graveyard to offer prayers for the party's martyrs who were killed in successive operations, she said. He will also visit the mausoleum of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, she said.

Over the weekend, Ibad met Musharraf and then Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali in Islamabad.

Ibad has vowed to bridge the gap between the rural and urban areas of Sindh and work for the country's stability and prosperity.

Ibad is a doctor by profession and his family migrated from Bihar in India. The nomination of Ibad as governor of Sindh is seen as a symbolic victory for the MQM which suffered one crackdown after another at the hands of the authorities for its alleged anti-state activities and fomenting violence in urban Sindh.

The MQM had been a target of massive military and police operations through the 1990s. Successive governments have blamed the MQM for most of the political violence in the city. The MQM denies the charge and said hundreds of its workers were summarily executed during successive operations.

Qadir Magsi, who leads the radical Sindhi nationalist group, Sindh Tariqi Pasand Party (Sindh Progressive Party) said that his followers would not just observe a black day against the appointment of Muttahida's nominee as as governor, but would launch a struggle against him. "We have no differences with the Urdu speaking people, but we will not tolerate those who promoted terrorism," he said.

The MQM has 17 members in the National Assembly and is a key partner of Jamali's fragile coalition government, which has a wafer-thin simple majority of just one vote.

The MQM has 41 members in the Sindh assembly and without its support the PML-QA, which has only 15 seats in the 168-member house, cannot run the government.

Nisar Khoro, a senior leader of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, said political nominees have served as governors in the past. "I don't see any thing wrong in it," he said. The objection about Ibad's nomination is because of his involvement in many criminal cases, he said. People have a right to know whether the president has pardoned him or the cases against him were cooked up, he said.