KARACHI: Pakistan People’s Party leader Makhdoom Amin Fahim, after lying low for quite sometime, has finally become active and is currently engaged in gathering all those (Benazir) Bhutto loyalists who had been sidelined by her widower Asif Ali Zardari at the time of government formation. Now the main aim of Fahim is to form a forward bloc within the party.
In this connection, he has held several meetings with Naheed Khan, Bhutto’s political secretary and her closest confidante, former federal minister Nawab Yusuf Talpur, and founder PPP members like Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Mustafa Khar, and former minister Khalid Kharal.
Helping him in his endeavors is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s cousin, Mumtaz Bhutto, who believes that the family of the party founder, late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, should be assembled on one platform to put a joint front against Zardari whom Mumtaz thinks as an outsider and an illegal heir to Bhutto legacy.
Mumtaz reportedly is contacting the family members of Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, and also his sole surviving daughter Sanam. Murtaza was killed in a police action in Karachi on Sept. 20, 1996, when Bhutto was in power, while Shah Nawaz reportedly was poisoned by his former Afghan wife in exile in French Riviera.
Sanam has never been in active politics and is living a retired life in London with her children. However, she came to Pakistan after a long time to join the last rites of her sister, slain in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Garden on Dec. 27 last year, two and half months after returning from a long self-exile.
Fahim, after watching the situation closely, has perhaps come to the conclusion that the PPP government, under Zardari’s leadership, has been losing popularity. It has failed to deliver and could not ensure relief to the common man who is still struggling for essential commodities like wheat flour, cooking oil, and is suffering badly from price spiral. The coming months, therefore, will be worth watching.
