It is welcome to note that  people-friendly personality Syed Murad Ali Shah has once again made to the Chief Minister's position in a dignified and democratic way.

Apart from Punjab, the Chief Minister of Sindh was also elected on Monday. The Provincial Assembly members of Sindh expressed confidence in his leadership by electing him as the Chief Minister for the third time. PTI-backed independent members and Jamaat-e-Islami also boycotted the election process here, but MQM countered them.  Syed Murad Ali Shah got 112 votes while MQM candidate got 36 votes. Announcing his plan of action after the election, the Chief Minister said that he would take the opposition along. The speed of implementation of development projects will be accelerated. Salaries of employees will be doubled in 5 years. Bandits will be eliminated by conducting an operation in the Kacha area and Karachi will be made a crime-free city.

He expressed commitment to supply solar energy and bring relief to the dwellers of the mega city. He declared the talk of Karachi's separation from Sindh as unacceptable and pledged to remedy the deficiencies left in the construction and development of the province in his previous terms.  Syed Murad Ali Shah is an experienced politician and administrator. It should be expected that he will use all his energies to solve the public problems of his province and for the development and prosperity of the country in the wider national context. Apart from political and economic instability, the country and the nation are currently facing the problems of rising inflation, increasing burden of debt and terrorism, etc., and it should be expected that the phase of transfer of power at the federal level will also be done in order to solve them.  It will be done in an efficient way. Political parties have to play their positive role in the national interest in this regard. In the country, on the one hand, protests against the combined rigging of the political parties that lost in the general elections are ongoing, on the other hand, new chief ministers have been elected in the two major provinces of Punjab and Sindh.  The caretaker governments have ended and the power has been transferred to the elected representatives.

The meetings of the provincial assemblies of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan were held yesterday, after which the first phase of the democratic process will be completed in the four provinces except the federation.  Maryam Nawaz of PML-N was elected as the first woman Chief Minister of a province in the Punjab Assembly session on Tuesday. She got 220 votes while the opposition candidate could not get a single vote due to opposition boycott.  The new Chief Minister also took the oath of office in the Governor's House. In her first address after being elected, she first announced measures to end inflation and expressed her resolve to restore health card, start air ambulance service, end corruption, implement Ramadan package and party manifesto.

In her 17-point agenda as the Chief Minister, the 5-year roadmap announced includes making Punjab a business hub, issuing small business loans, providing state-of-the-art hospitals, Danish schools, safe environment for women in every district , education for intelligent students at the expense of the government, increasing the quality of government schools, providing loans and electric bikes to the youth, higher education facilities for special children, prevention of corruption, monitoring of cheap markets and special package for transgenders etc. are also included.  Immediately after taking the oath, Maryam visited a police station through narrow and dark streets and interacted with inmates, a welcome sign of her pragmatism. If the program presented by the two CMs of Sindh and Punjab to solve inflation, unemployment and other public problems is implemented, it will certainly be a revolutionary development in terms of public welfare and development.  As far as Sindh is concerned, after the 2024 election, the process of government formation in Sindh has been completed.  It may be recalled here that twelve general elections were held in Pakistan after 1970, in which the Pakistan People's Party participated in eleven elections, while it did not participate in the non-partisan election of 1985. Pakistan Peoples Party emerged as the majority party in these eleven elections in Sindh. Despite being the majority party in the 1990, 1997 and 2002 elections, the People's Party was not allowed to form the government in Sindh. In the election results of 2024, Sindh is the eighth and fourth consecutive government of Pakistan People's Party, Syed Murad Ali Shah has been appointed as the Chief Minister of Sindh for the third consecutive time. In 2024, Pakistan People's Party has won a record number of seats from the province to form the government, with Mahesh Kumar Malani from NA-215 Tharparkar General Assembly seat and Hari Ram Kishori Lal from PS-45 Mirpurkhas (two Hindus) on People's Party General Seat succeeded by which is good news for  minorities.

Along with this, a Christian member, Anthony Naveed Salhotra, has been elected as the Deputy Speaker of the Sindh Assembly.  In the 2024 election, the Pakistan People's Party has won more national and provincial assembly seats from Sindh province than all the elections, despite the fact that in this election, all the nationalist, religious parties and the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) together contested against the candidates of PPP, and managed to win only two provincial assembly seats apart from Karachi and Hyderabad.  In Sindh, GDA and its allied parties did not expect the worst defeat of 2024. On the other hand, Pakistan People's Party Organized election campaign and the traditional supporter of People's Party voters defeated their opposition candidates. After the defeat, the GDA and especially the Functional Muslim League took out massive rallies in the cities of Jamshoro and Moro in Sindh.  Likewise, members of the Sindh Assembly in Karachi on Friday. The GDA's call to encircle the Sindh Assembly on the occasion of the swearing-in ceremony also failed. Meawhle, PTI founder Imran Khan's statement inviting the International Monetary Fund to intervene and writing a letter to the IMF making the aid conditional on the audit of Pakistan's recent election has raised a wave of concern and made every patriot think that this demand is tantamout to country's welfare. As a result of the public reaction after his anti-Pakistan statement, it was expected that the PTI leadership would back down from its position, but the founder PTI said that if the IMF gives a loan to the government, it will not return it and in case of writing a letter to the IMF, there will be no harm to the interests of Pakistan, but the masses rejected  Imran's stand as his move to write letter to the IMF is against the national interest .  It is good to see, as reported that the IMF did not take the PTI leadership's proposal seriously and expressed its willingness to work with the new government while rejecting the IK's letter.

Published in The Daily National Courier, March, 02 2024

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