Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday forwarded a summary to President Arif Alvi for the appointment of Mutahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) leader Nasreen Jalil as the governor of Sindh.
The appointment of Jalil came days after the MQM-P’s Coordination Committee shared with Shehbaz a list of five names, including Jalil’s, for the governorship.
The Sindh governor’s post had become vacant when Imran Ismail resigned in the aftermath of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) ouster from power through a vote of no-confidence.
The former governor had sent his resignation to President Alvi hours before Shehbaz took oath as the prime minister of Pakistan. The president had accepted his resignation nearly a week later.
In the absence of a sitting governor, Sindh Assembly Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani is currently handling additional responsibilities.
Interestingly, Jalil would be the first woman in nearly five decades to occupy the top office after Begum Ra’ana Liaqat Ali who had become the governor of Sindh in 1973.
Jalil rose to prominence in 2016 through a letter she purportedly wrote to the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, asking New Delhi to raise its voice to “safeguard human rights, particularly in Karachi”.
In one letter — apparently penned by Jalil — the party stressed the “lawlessness of law enforcement agencies” and requests the high commission to use its good offices “to improve the situation of urban Sindh”.
The letter undersigned by the MQM leader was addressed to T. C. A. Raghavan, India’s high commissioner in Pakistan at the time.
It read: “The targeted operation in Karachi was initiated to bring law and order in the city but since then, 40 MQM workers have been killed in custody, 90 party workers are missing while hundreds are killed in target killings.”
It also added that no compensation had been paid to the families of victims belonging to MQM who were killed “extra-judicially” or to those who went missing.
The prime minister also accepted the resignations of Lt Gen Muzzamil Hussain, the chairman of Water & Power Development Authority (Wapda), who had decided to step down from the post a day earlier over “personal reasons”.
He was first appointed as Wapda chairman on August 24, 2016, by the then-government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and then offered a second-successive term of five years in August 2021 during the PTI’s tenure
