KARACHI, Jan 5: The Sindh National Front chief, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, has emphasized the need for urgent police reforms to end “corruption and incompetence in the force which has become totally useless.”

Talking to party workers in Karachi, he also emphasized the need for motivating police to fight crime.

“They (police) are not doing so, and they are just terrorizing innocent people whose life, property and honour they have to protect,” Mr Bhutto was quoted as saying in a party press release issued on Saturday.

He was of the view that no reform could be effective unless corruption and incompetence were eradicated.

Mr Bhutto said that the requirement to produce identity cards for registration as voter would leave a vast number of people out of the voting list for the simple reason that identity cards were difficult to obtain.

Either identity cards must be provided or its requirement for registration as voter should be removed, he said.

He said that if general elections were held on the pattern of “local bodies elections in which every rule was violated and massive rigging was resorted to, nobody will accept the results of the general elections.”

He said that unless that was done it would be useless to participate in the general elections.

Referring to the water shortage problem over which the people were demonstrating across the province, he was critical of the government’s response and said that unless it gave serious consideration to the matter, it could get out of control.