HYDERABAD: Muttahida Qau­mi Movement-Pakistan’s senior deputy convener Amir Khan has said that his party’s demand for a separate province is within constitutional bounds and a referendum can be held over the question.

He said at a press briefing held ahead of the party’s ‘Hyderabad March’, planned by the party for Sunday (October 4), that everyone understood the state could do anything.

Since Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had always shown its bias towards urban centres and denied them due share in development, the MQM-P was compelled to tell people that their problems could not be solved unless they had the separate province, he said.

He said the purpose of staging the march was to highlight injustices the PPP government had meted out to the Urdu-speaking community over the past 13 years. MQM-P would tell people that PPP government which came into being on the basis of fake majority after questionable census would not develop the cities as they were considered Muttahida’s strongholds, he said.

He said that PPP government gave hardly 5,000 jobs to cities against 300,000 vacancies and it did not release funds for MQM-Ps strongholds to make the party’s electorates disenchanted with it but PPP failed in its attempt.

He said that PPP was so biased towards the Urdu-speaking people that its leaders opposed establishment of a university in Hyderabad and went as far as saying the university could be built only over their bodies.

The Muttahida MQM was forced to tell its voters as long as the PPP was at the helm of affairs no good could be expected from it. If populations of Hyderabad and Karachi had been counted correctly, PPP would have lost its majority in the Sindh Assembly, he claimed.

“It is the PPP whose leader raised slogan of udher tum, idher hum yet it had the temerity to accuse MQM-P of ethnicity. The party should be ashamed of it,” he said.

He wondered that PPP could not find even a single officer from among the Urdu-speaking community to become the administrator of any city in Sindh. The MQM-P had fielded a friend from the Sindhi speaking community in Azizabad who won election but PPP had never found anyone from among the Urdu-speaking community who could be made the chief minister, he said.

Khan said that MQM-P’s Karachi rally showed that people were still with the party. “We are not against any particular community as we consider all as our brothers,” he remarked.

He said that Oct 4 rally would inform people that MQM-P’s demand for the separate province was constitutional and that administrative units should be increased wherever needed in Pakistan. The constitution could be amended to meet requirement of new provinces, he said.

Khan said while answering a question that the quota system was introduced after partition to distribute assets among refugees in India and Pakistan and vice versa under a pact between the new states and it was not a favour with those who were arriving in Pakistan after laying tremendous sacrifices for their new homeland. If quota system had been useful then why it had not been introduced across Pakistan, he said.

He said that PPP government failed to alienate people from MQM-P even after thrusting upon them a toothless local government system. Karachi contributed Rs3,000 billion to Pakistan but it was denied share in development and Sindh government received 95 per cent of revenue there but it did not give matching funds to the urban centres.

He said that MQM-P was not opposed to LG polls, it only wanted correct census to be held before the polls. Saeed Ghani became unnerved after witnessing MQM-P’s rally but if it was a flop show why was PPP getting restless for staging a counter show on Sunday in Karachi, he said. “But please bring real Karachiites to your rally,” he said.

He said that through the rally the PPP would be ‘celebrating’ destruction of LG system, its 13 years of failures, issuance of fake domiciles and denial of jobs to urban population.

Khan admitted that MQM-P mayors might not have lived up to expectations of its voters but he believed they would realise that they did try to deliver with scant resources and a weak LG system thrust on them by PPP government. All those involved in corruption in LGs regardless of their political background should face the law, he said.

About Karachi Transformation Plan, he said that he wondered where the Rs1,100bn funds were going to come from. Most of the schemes had been put under public sector development programme by federal government while the Sindh government claimed it would give Rs800bn but nobody knew how, he said.

Likewise, he said, Rs300bn were for Karachi Circular Railway out of which Rs40bn had already been spent and another Rs35bn would be spent next year. “I feel Rs1,100bn plan will be no different from the earlier Rs162bn package,” he declared.

Asked whether PTI was hoodwinking Sindh government and MQM-P at the same time, he replied ‘people must realise what was happening’.

Wasim Akhtar said that Karachi’s population constituted half of total Sindh population and NFC was distributed on the basis of population. The Sindh government owed Rs40bn to Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, he said.

Aminul Haq said that technical committees of PTI and MQM-P would present their reports in the committee headed by Ali Zaidi over census issue and audit of 5pc census blocks and things would hopefully get clearer within a month.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2020