ISLAMABAD: The father used all his persuasive skills to prevail upon his daughter not to change her political course, but she was adamant on switching sides. The dad became helpless.

“I tried to convince Azma and her spouse to remain with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) even if they are being ignored by it but I failed,” Zahid Hussain Bokhari, who is a prominent name in the lawyers’ community, said when contacted to seek his comments on his daughter’s joining of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

She was among nine MPAs belonging to the PPP, who joined the PML-N on Friday after meeting Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

He said he was a diehard PPP worker and would want to die in this position. He added that the decision of his daughter and son-in-law to affiliate with the PML-N was their personal. “The PPP is my soul.”

Bokhari said that his daughter was the sole fighter in private TV channels, defending the PPP on every occasion, but she was being ignored by the party high-ups as juniors were given priority over her. He said that his daughter has told her all this and that he tried to convince her not to leave the PPP but to no avail.

When approached, she said that during these encounters she had been following the party line. But when the ephedrine scandal emerged, she said, she refused to shield such kind of corruption. “This is not the ideology that the PPP has been pursuing.”

Azma said that disgusted with the PPP policies she was totally inactive for the past eighteen months, sitting at home. Corruption and bad governance permeated and brought a bad name to the PPP, she said adding that she still remembered that Benazir Bhutto had stated in 2003 that the ministers should serve the people and the country. “Nothing such was being done.”

She said President Asif Ali Zardari had told his colleagues that the last year of the government would show its performance. She said there has been no noteworthy performance of the administration the party can boast of.