Nisar Khoro is not defending Sindh, he is defending his party’s grip on it.
I will put forward my position. I think Sindh would be better governed with smaller administrative units, who actually live under them, and I think Nisar Khoro’s behavior last week shows why these reforms are often strangled before they reach the people.
Start with what he said. His whole complaint against Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi was that Naqvi had dragged the field marshal into politics. Then Khoro did it himself, much more directly than Naqvi. We did not run away from the fear of Ziaul Haq, he said that we did not run away from the fear of Musharraf, so even this field marshal cannot face us. This is not an institution’s defense against politics. It’s lifting the rank of the institution and swinging it at a political rival, and it only brought it down when the backlash made it clear how badly it had landed.
I want to point out that what follows is my opinion, not documented fact. I don’t know what happened within the PPP leadership after this line went viral. But a senior party figure doesn’t usually come up with something outrageous and then completely change himself within a day, with no weight on him. He has the appearance of a man who said more than his party wanted, and was pulled back by those more powerful than he.
Have now spent the entire week avoiding this argument. Naqvi’s case for new administrative units is not abstract. Four out of ten children in this country are not getting the education they need. Only half the population has reliable access to clean drinking water. Districts like Sindh, Larkana, Sukkur, Shikarpur and Tharparkar outside Karachi have been outside a provincial capital for decades, and the distance between where decisions are made and where people actually live is a big part of why the numbers look like they do. Smaller administrative units mean local budgets, local accountability, and a district government that cannot blame a province three hundred kilometers away for a school without a roof or a well without water. Naqvi has repeatedly said that it is about governance, not identity, and that no unit is formed without public consent. Khoro never answered the case on its merits. He has sometimes responded angrily.
It’s worth asking who actually benefits from changing something. Khoro spent years as Sindh’s food minister and later assembly speaker, years that came with one NAB inquiry after another, irregularities in wheat procurement, assets disproportionate to income, questions about his own bank accounts, bail requests more than once. None of this is believed as far as the public record shows, and I say that frankly because it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But a man with so much unresolved history surrounding his own department’s money is in no position to present himself as Sindh’s protector against anyone.
In fact, this is what happened on September 3. Khoro and 105 PPP MLAs stood in the Sindh Assembly carrying banners of Mother Earth and blocked the whole question after being asked anything in front of the people outside the House. If the PPP believed as much as it claims that the people of Sindh reject small administrative units, the honest move would be for them to say so directly through a real vote. Instead, the party put him in a room full of its own members and dropped the matter. It is not defending Sindh. It’s one party deciding, on behalf of everyone else, that the conversation is over.
Anyone raising doubts about administrative reforms is not doing so for the sake of Sindh and Khoro is a clear example. Strip away Waqar and Ziaul Haq and Musharraf, and the party actually being protected has been running the province for two decades, led in Sindh by a man whose record still raises more questions than answers. This is not a rule. It is a grasp on power, dressed up as devotion to the earth.
One of Us: Eighteen Years of Sindh Government, Same Old Story
The post Nisar Khoro is not defending Sindh, he is defending his party’s grip appeared first on Daily Pakistan English News.
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