Karachi: After years of alienation, the estranged factions of Karachi-based Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) Pakistan for the first time joined hands together to stage a demonstration to protest against what they called the highly controversial delimitation of the constituencies to hold the local government polls in the provincial capital.
The protest was held outside the Karachi offices of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) where the local government polls are scheduled to be held in the provincial capital on January 15. The elections in Karachi and Hyderabad have been pending since July last year as they were deferred multiple times by the ECP due to floods.
The demonstration was attended by leaders and activists of MQM Pakistan, Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP), Mohajir Quami Movement also known as MQM-Haqiqi, and an estranged faction of MQM led by its former central leader Dr Farooq Sattar. Former Karachi mayor, Syed Mustafa Kamal, who had earlier remained associated with MQM, formed the PSP in 2016, after parting ways with his parent political party. The MQM-Haqiqi came into existence back in 1992 during an army-led operation against lawlessness in urban areas of Sindh.
MQM Pakistan chief, Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, earlier met the leadership of all the factions to convince them to jointly stage the demonstration.
Sindh Governor, Kamran Khan Tessori, who also belongs to MQM, also played an active role to bring together all the divided factions of the party.
Addressing the demonstrators, Dr Siddiqui said that injustice had been done with Karachi when a flawed census drive in 2017 had failed to accurately count the population of the city.
He said that highly unfair delimitation of the constituencies was like committing pre-poll rigging in Karachi as local government polls couldn’t be held fairly in the city without rectifying these issues.
He said the delimitation exercise that had been carried out in Karachi was meant to extend a highly undue advantage to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party.
Dr Siddiqui said that in the present circumstances, the residents of Karachi wouldn’t get the chance to duly elect their favourite representatives for managing the civic and municipal affairs of the city.
He also urged the Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, to take cognisance of the situation and take the needful steps to serve justice to the residents of the city that accounted for the majority volume of revenue generated in the country.
PSP Chief, Mustafa Kamal, asked the rulers to empower the local government agencies of the province so that they should speedily resolve the basic civic issues of the people at their doorstep.
He lamented that the basic civic infrastructure of the city had been in a shambles for the past many years as the relevant municipal agencies utterly lacked the authority to do the desperately needed uplift work.
