PPP’s Owais Shah elected as Sindh Assembly Speaker, Anthony Naveed his deputy

Senior leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party Syed Owais Shah was on Sunday elected as the Speaker of the Sindh province Assembly while the party’s Christian face Anthony Naveed was elected as his deputy, becoming the first non-Muslim deputy speaker in the country’s history.

Outgoing speaker Agha Siraj Durrani said a total of 147 votes were cast for the post of speaker, of which Shah received 111.

His opponent and Muttahida Qaumi Movement (Pakistan) leader Sofia Shah got 36 votes, Dawn newspaper reported. Nine independent members of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

(PTI) and one member of the Jamaat-e-Islami did not participate in the voting and boycotted the election.

PPP leader and prominent Christian rights activist Anthony Naveed was elected as the deputy speaker of the provincial

assembly, becoming the first non-Muslim deputy speaker in the history of Pakistan. Naveed secured 111 votes while MQM-P’s Rashid Khan got 36 votes.

Following the win, Naveed took his oath in Urdu and then went up to the speaker’s dais to embrace Speaker Shah. On Sunday, nine PTI-backed independent members of the Sindh Assembly also took the oath, resulting in a total of 157 members taking the oath.