KARACHI: Sindh Information and Labour Minister Saeed Ghani said Wednesday the law and order situation of the province would be compromised if the federal government was allowed to unilaterally withdraw seven senior police officials posted in Sindh.
Talking to media persons here at the Sindh Assembly building, the Sindh Information Minister said the proposal to transfer seven senior officials of the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) was not acceptable to the provincial government as the maintenance of the law and order situation was fully its responsibility.
He reiterated the demand of the Sindh government that the centre should immediately withdraw its order to transfer seven senior police officials of the province as the same request was also contained in the letter sent by the Sindh Chief Minister to the Prime Minister. He recalled the statement of the Sindh CM that the Establishment Division in Islamabad shouldn’t bother the senior police officers posted in the province on account of the row between the federal and provincial governments. He told media persons that Sindh had 26 posts of grade-20 police officials as against them 22 PSP officers had been working in the province. He said that the centre had transferred eight police officials as the province would accept four of them while four would be repatriated to Islamabad keeping in view the vacant positions in the province.
He said that similarly Sindh still faced a shortage of 44 officers of Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS) despite that the federal government had sent four more PAS officials. He lamented the situation that the incumbent federal government was not ready to talk to or hold consultation with the Sindh CM despite that he was the chief executive of one of the provinces of Pakistan. He said the federal government should do a consultation with the Sindh CM on such contentious administrative issues as he was not the chief minister of any province of Israel and India.
He said that such an attitude of the centre was tantamount to penalizing the people of Sindh as they had chosen the Pakistan People’s Party to rule in the province in the last general elections. To a question, the Information Minister said the government was bound to act upon the directives of the honourable judiciary. “But, personally I would prefer to leave my post and join my people if in case I was asked to act upon any such judgment whose implementation would result in any human catastrophe or rendering people homeless,” he said. To another question, he said the federal cabinet the other day had raised a baseless point that 1.6 million tones of wheat was stolen from Sindh as the provincial government had been asked to conduct an investigation into this matter.
Ghani said that he didn’t know that who in the federal cabinet had made such a baseless claim. He expressed surprise that a handout was also issued after the meeting of the federal cabinet containing the demand that the Sindh government should inquire into this issue. He said the claim that the 1.6 million tonnes of wheat had been stolen from the province had no basis at all when the Sindh government’s total wheat procurement in a year stood at 1.2 million tones.
He said that Punjab shouldn’t face a wheat shortage as the province produced 70 per cent of the total harvest of essential food commodity in the country but such a shortage did take place just one month after the wheat cultivation in the neighboring province. He lamented the situation that the Opposition political parties in Sindh Assembly had opposed a resolution in the house aimed at protecting several housing projects in the province so that their residents shouldn’t be rendered homeless.
Answering a query, the Sindh Information Minister said that MQM had been involved in the land grabbing in the past to illegally occupy amenity land in the province He said the Sindh government would adopt necessary amendments in the provincial local government law before December 1 to ensure that the Election Commission of Pakistan was able to conduct municipal elections in the province.