QUETTA: The Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) has filed review petitions in the Balochistan High Court and the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s Quetta registry on the issue of census in Balochistan.

The party’s information secretary, Advocate Agha Hasan Baloch, told Dawn on Friday that the BNP-M had pleaded in the petitions that it and the Baloch people had reservations about conducting the census in the presence over a half a million Afghan refugees in the province.

The petitions said that over a million Baloch people had migrated to Sindh and other areas because of instability in various parts of Balochistan.

“In the presence of Afghan refugees, who had settled in various areas of the province, conducting the census would be injustice with the Baloch people,” the BNP-M leader said.

‘In the presence of Afghan refugees conducting the census would be injustice with the Baloch people’

He said the party had maintained in the petitions that the census should be postponed till the return of the Baloch population to their areas in the province and repatriation of the refugees to Afghanistan.

Advocate Baloch submitted the petition in the Supreme Court registry, while the one in the BHC was filed by party leader Ghulam Nabi Marri.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2017