KARACHI: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan on Friday claimed that the Sindh government was selectively implementing the Supreme Court’s directives against encroachments in Karachi and its ‘discriminate’ action aimed at further deepening the ethnic and linguistic divide in the metropolis.

“Without any due process, the Sindh government is violating the law and Constitution on the pretext of implementing decisions of the chief justice and targeting those who are permanently living here,” MQM-P convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told a press conference here at his party’s temporary headquarters in Bahadurabad.

He said that the MQM-P was in favour of removing all encroachments from Karachi, but there should be no discrimination as the issue of encroachments dated back to the Ayub Khan era when a specific mindset started grabbing land and plots.

Dr Siddiqui said that people had been questioning the manner in which some areas were selected and others were spared for implementing SC directives.

Slams ‘lack of representation’ of all ethnicities living in province in Sindh Secretariat

‘Ethnicity’ in Sindh Secretariat

Condemning the PPP government in Sindh, he said that except one linguistic group there was almost no representation of the people belonging to other ethnic backgrounds in the Sindh Secretariat and Sindh Public Service Commission.

He asked whether any official responsible for issuing land documents to innocent people was punished for his crimes.

He said that action should have first been taken against those officials who granted permissions to these encroachments.

He appealed to the chief justice of Pakistan to take action on MQM’s petitions with regard to a flawed census and implementation of Article 140-A of the Constitution and provide justice to the youths of the city who had been deprived of over 100,000 government jobs that had been given to people having fake domiciles.

“We have utmost respect for the incumbent chief justice and superior judiciary and whatever justice we got was given by the superior judiciary,” he said, adding: “Chief Justice Sahib, this city is praying for your intervention. Selective justice is no justice ... justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.

The MQM convener demanded that a commission be set up to take action against all encroachments made in the past 40 years and against those officials who had facilitated them.

Senior leader Aamir Khan said that the Sindh government was not implementing SC directives regarding castle-like boundary walls in Clifton and Sharea Faisal, neither did it have the courage to launch an operation in Banaras and Sohrab Goth similar to the one it launched in Gulshan-i-Iqbal in no time.

He said that the Sindh government should have given alternative accommodations to the victim families of its anti-encroachment operations.

He asked as why residences of innocent people in Karachi were not being regularised after imposing certain fines on the same pattern of Banigala residence of Prime Minister Imran Khan, which was regularised.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2021