CHANDIGARH: The new Pakistan prime minister Shehbaz Sharif hails from Jati Umra village near Amritsar. The villagers are delighted that the president of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), who visits the village once in a while, has become the prime minister of Pakistan. They look forward to better India-Pak ties during his tenure.
The village is in the Tarn Taran district of Punjab. The 720-odd villagers have been reportedly praying that Shehbaz should become the prime minister of the neighbouring country. A villager echoing the sentiments of others said that he hoped all contentious issues between India and Pakistan would be resolved.
This village has a population of 720 people who depend on farming. The villagers recall that the last time Shehbaz visited the village was eight years ago.
Talking to The New Indian Express, Dr Dilbagh Singh, whose father late Massa Singh was a friend of Mian Mohammad Sharif father of Shehbaz Sharif and former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said, "all the villagers have prayed (Ardas) yesterday and today in the village gurdwara that Shehbaz Sharif becomes the next Prime Minister of Pakistan. He has been the longest-serving Chief Minister of Pakistan's Punjab province."
"It was on December 15, 2013, that Shenbaz along with his father and five uncles came to the village for a day and mingled with the villagers. Later Sharif along with his family members visited the grave of his great grandfather Mian Mohammad and offered a holy sheet. While we visited their family’s house in Lahore twice,’’ recalls Singh. He noted that the new Pakistan PM's two-room ancestral house in the village is now part of the village Gurdwara.
He says that the house was earlier just behind the gurdwara. During their visit, they donated the house for the gurudwara. Before the house became part of the gurudwara, a school was functioning from there.
Singh said that his father told him that in 1964 also Sharif has come to the village along with his family. "The cousin brothers of Sharif have been regularly in touch with the village and last came in 2018,’’ he said.
Sharif was born on September 23, 1951, to a Punjabi-speaking family of the Mian clan in Lahore of Punjab in Pakistan. His family had emigrated from Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir for business and then settled in Jati Umra village in Taran Taran was the only Muslim family in this Sikh-dominated village and after Partition his parents migrated to Lahore. He did his BA from the Government College of Lahore.
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