Bhutto-Zardari summons key party meeting as tensions deepen within Pakistan’s ruling coalition
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s ruling coalition faced fresh strain on Wednesday after former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari summoned a high-level meeting of his party to decide its stance amid an escalating rift with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government at the center.
The disagreement between the two main coalition partners — Bhutto-Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) — has widened over how to distribute federal relief funds to victims of recent floods that have killed more than 1,000 people across Pakistan this year.
The PPP wants cash aid routed through the federal Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), a welfare scheme named after Bhutto-Zardari’s late mother and former premier Benazir Bhutto, while Punjab’s PML-N government insists on using its own provincial damage assessments.
Tensions intensified after Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the PM’s niece, defended her province’s right to control its water resources. The remarks angered the PPP-led government in Sindh province, which lies downstream along the Indus River, Pakistan’s main water source, and has long accused Punjab of hoarding water flows.
