Despite being favourite for winning PS-88, PPP taking by-poll as challenge

Despite the divided opposition, the provincial assembly constituency of PS-88 District Malir, which fall vacant in June last year after the death of provincial minister Ghulam Murtaza Baloch due to the novel coronavirus, poses a challenge to the Pakistan Peoples Party because of its urban votes and anxiety of the rural population over the construction of the Malir Expressway.

On February 8, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari held a meeting of the party’s parliamentarians, former local government chairmen and leaders from District Malir. It was his second meeting with the party’s Malir leadership within a few weeks for the PS-88 by-poll to be held tomorrow (February 16).

“Although the PPP Karachi and Malir leadership are confident that they will retain the constituency easily, Bilawal has asked them to take the by-polls a challenge because he does not want any risk,” a PPP Malir’s senior leader privy to the meetings told The News.

“After a humiliating defeat in Lyari in the 2018 general polls and then in Larkana in a by-poll in 2019, Bilawal is not satisfied with the party’ confidence about winning PS-88 and wants to retain the seat at any cost.”

The PPP has fielded the son of the late Murtaza, Yousaf Baloch, in the by-poll. As many as 108 polling stations have been set up in the constituency for the by-election, of which 36 have been declared sensitive and 33 highly sensitive in terms of security concerns.

In the 2018 general election, the PPP’s Murtaza had won the seat by securing 22,561 votes against 16,386 of the runner-up, Captain (retd) Muhammad Rizwan Khan, who was the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's (PTI) candidate.

The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) candidate, Rizwan Ahmed, ranked third after bagging 7,694 votes, while the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan’s (MQM-P) candidate, Syed Abul

Hassan, was fourth with 5,207 votes.

Now, the PTI has fielded Jansher Junejo in the by-poll and the MQM-P’s candidate is former MNA Sajid Ahmed. The TLP has fielded Kashif Shah.

Why is PPP worried?

In Karachi, the PPP has influence mainly in the Baloch- and Sindhi-populated areas such as Malir, Lyari and Keamari, and thus being in District Malir, PS-88 is among the few constituencies in the city where the party has strong chances to win.

The PS 88, which was PS-127 before the new delimitation on the basis of the 2017 census, is also special for the PPP because of its slain

parliamentarian Abdullah Murad who had won the constituency in the 2002 general elections by defeating the MQM.

However, the PPP could not win the constituency for a long period of 12 years after Murad was gunned down in March 2004. It was in September 2016, when the PPP final managed to win the constituency again in a by-poll. It was the time when the MQM was facing law enforcement agencies’ crackdown after the party supremo Altaf Hussain’s August 22, 2016, speech against the country.

This time again, the MQM-P seems to be a shadow of its former self and the runner-up of the constituency in the last election, PTI, is also in the fray. The PTI and MQM-P are coalition partners in the federal government but they could not reach an agreement to field a joint candidate.

Due to the divided opposition, the PPP seems to have good chances of retaining the constituency. However, it also fears a set-back in the polls due to the constituency’s demography and other reasons.

Demography

The constituency consists of urban and rural areas falling under the District Municipal Corporation Malir and the District Council Karachi. Its urban parts include Khokhrapar, Malir Extension Colony, Saadi Town, parts of Gulistan-e-Jauhar, residential apartment projects on Sharea Faisal and the Malir Cantonment. The rural areas in the constituency included villages of Malir, Murad Memon Goth and Darsano Chana.

“In the constituency after the delimitation, the number of voters in rural areas are very less than the number of urban voters,” said Sami Memon, a Malir-based journalist. “The PPP mainly garners support from rural areas while the urban votes would be divided into three parties - MQM-P, PTI and TLP,” Memon told The News.

To give a tough time to the PPP, the PTI delegation in early January visited the MQM-P’s temporary headquarters to seek the latter’s support in the PS-88 by-polls for its candidate. However, instead of supporting the PTI, which is its ally, the MQM-P decided to field its own candidate.

Memon said that the failure to bring a joint candidate by the PTI and MQM-P would split the urban votes and help the PPP. In the meantime, the TLP had emerged as a spoiler not only in the urban votes of the MQM-P and the PTI but also for the traditional rural voters of the PPP in Darsano Chana and Memon Goth, he added.

Malir Expressway issue

The PPP had also been facing opposition from rural residents of the constituency due to the Malir Expressway project as some residents believe that the project would result in demolitions of the oldest villages in the area, displacing a large number of people and destroying cultivation.

Bilawal in December performed the groundbreaking of the expressway project and termed it the “biggest civic infrastructure project ever done by any provincial government in Pakistan under public-private partnership”.

The Malir Expressway will be built as an access-controlled 38.5-kilometre-long high-speed toll expressway to connect Karachi’s centre to the M-9 motorway between Karachi and Hyderabad.

People of Malir have organised several protests against the project and. recently, civil society and urban rights groups, such as the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and Urban Resource Centre, supported their stance in a press conference.

Hanif Dilmurad, a resident and activist leading the campaign against the expressway, complained that in the name of development projects in Malir, the PPP-led provincial government had been converting the indigenous people into a minority and displacing them in thousands after

demolishing their villages.

The campaign against the Malir Expressway, along with other factors, has resulted in the formation of the Baloch Muttahida Mahaz, a Karachi-based alliance comprising Baloch political, cultural, and social activists, particularly from Malir and Lyari. Veteran politician Yousaf Masti Khan heads the alliance.