HYDERABAD: Leaders of religious, national and nationalist parties and NGOs have rejected the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s demand for creation of more administrative units in the country and feared that it was the beginning of the separation of Karachi and Hyderabad from Sindh.

They said that the Pakistan Peoples Party should clarify its position with regard to the MQM and announce its dissociation from the party whose politics revolved round ethnicity.

They were speaking at a dialogue on ‘Integrity of Sindh and the constitution’ organised by the Hyderabad Civil Society Network and the Political Parties Steering Committee in collaboration with the Strengthening Participatory Organisation at the Sindhi Language Authority on Monday.

Sindh United Party vice-president and convener of the steering committee for Sindh Dr Dodo Maheri said that Sindh was a separate country when British colonialists occupied it and it used to have its own army and system of government.

He said that autonomy given to federating units in the 1940 Resolution had been done away with over the years and called for a continuous struggle by enabling people to fight for their rights.

He recalled that G.M. Syed used to say that when Sindhis launched the struggle for their rights, one segment of Urdu-speaking people would side with them, the other would oppose them and the third would leave the country.

Hyder Mallah, secretary general of the Sindh Taraqqi-pasand Party, questioned the MQM chief’s claim about sacrifices of Urdu-speaking people for Pakistan and said that no one from India’s UP and CP was hanged or martyred for his role in the freedom struggle while armed struggles led by Bhagat Singh and Sooriah Badshah were being waged against the colonial rulers.

He said that Urdu speakers could not even learn Sindhi despite intermarriage whereas almost all Sindhis could understand and speak Urdu.

Sagar Hanif Burdi, a central leader of the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz-Basheer, said that progress of nations was linked with their boundaries and Sindh was not dependent on any assembly. Sindh was the soul of people. If a struggle was not launched today when would it be launched then, he asked.

Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl leader Maulana Taj Mohammad Nahiyoon said that his party had taken a position even against the division of the subcontinent. How could it let Sindh divide, he wondered. Jamaat-i-Islami leader Abdul Waheed Qureshi said that the MQM wanted separation of Karachi and Hyderabad from Sindh and the call for creation of more administrative units was just a beginning. Hatred should be opposed tooth and nail in the larger interest of Sindh because it would lead to conflict, he added.

NOGs’ representatives Suleman Abro and Punhal Sario said that Sindh obtained nothing from the 18th amendment. General Ziaul Haq created the MQM which drove a wedge between Sindhi and Urdu-speaking communities through its politics of hatred.

They would not allow Sindh’s division and no constitutional gimmickry could protect Sindh except its own people, he said. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz district president Hanif Siddiqui, general secretary of the Hyderabad District Bar Association Fayaz Rajpar, Hyderabad Press Club secretary Mansoor Mari, SPO’s Mustafa Baloch, journalist Jaffar Memon, Ghaffar Malik of the Sindh Development Society, an NGO, and others also spoke at the dialogue.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2014