Benazir and KBD

Despite the antics of Gen Ziaul Haq and opposition by Wali Khan, work on Kalabagh dam never stopped. After ten years of exhaustive studies and reviews by the World Bank, foreign and local consultants, the project was at the stage of international tendering in 1986 when it had to be put on backburner because of controversy on the political front, as reported in a file in the Irrigation Department, Lahore.

This was when Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan and started opposing Gen Zia on everything under the sun including Kalabagh dam, “Sindh will become a desert if Kalabagh dam is built”, she said. This turned the whole of Sindh and half of Punjab dead against the dam.

After Ghulam Mustafa Khar had parted company with PPP, he gave an interview to the Jang newspaper in 1997. He said he was able to persuade Benazir about the need for Kalabagh dam.

He quoted her as saying in a cabinet meeting in Sindh that she had been against Kalabagh dam because it was Zia’s dam, but now that she had been briefed by the experts, she believed it was essential for Pakistan and for Sindh. When questioned by a journalist on the change in her original stand on the issue, she said how she could support Gen Ziaul Haq who had hanged her father. But on going out of power, she started opposing the dam again because now it had become Nawaz’s dam.

Her original opposition can be justified but having become convinced that Kalabagh dam was essential for Pakistan and for Sindh, her later opposition to the dam is the worst example of playing politics with an issue so vital to the interest of the country and its 18o million people.

MOHAMMAD FARHAN

Karachi