Sufi’s speech made Swat MPs’ skin crawl

Wednesday, April 22, 2009
By Khalid Kheshgi

PESHAWAR: Elected representatives from the restive Swat district have lost the last ray of hope following Maulana Sufi Muhammad’s speech at the Grassy Ground in Mingora wherein he termed democracy a system repugnant to Islam.
The provincial legislators, who had pinned high hopes on Sufi, a septuagenarian religious cleric from the Lower Dir district, have started dubbing him the most ‘unpredictable man’, besides calling him the ‘root cause’ of the ongoing trouble in Malakand.
Of seven MPAs and two MNAs from the Swat district, the Awami National Party had won all the provincial assembly seats and one of the National Assembly seats during the 2008 general elections.
The lawmakers, including the provincial ministers from Swat, stopped visiting their home constituencies since July 2008 when the Taliban scrapped a peace-deal with the provincial government and issued threats against the ANP parliamentarians and politicians in Swat.
Knowing their response about the expansion of the Swat-based Taliban networks to the neighbouring districts and showing no respect to the establishment of Qazi courts under the 2009 Regulations, The News separately interviewed some of the MPAs and provincial ministers from Swat, however, for certain reasons all of them requested not to be named.
A provincial minister from Swat said Sufi Muhammad should honour and reciprocate sincerity of the provincial government, for materialising the promise for implementing the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation in the Malakand division.

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