HYDERABAD: Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan Hyderabad district’s women wing held a demonstration against controversial local government law outside the local press club on Tuesday.
Activists belonging to the district chapter and members of the party’s Sindh organising committee and coordination committee also participated in the protest.
Senator Khalida Tayyab said that Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) got this law passed from the Sindh Assembly but her party would not let it “commit a robbery on the rights of people of Sindh”. She said the rights had been usurped in the name of quota system. Government jobs were doled out on the basis of fake domiciles, she claimed.
The Senator said that local bodies’ elections were held to devolve powers at grass root level but the PPP had done vice versa by usurping LGs’ powers.
‘PPP govt wants to render local bodies powerless’
MNA Kishwar Zahra told the participants said that the protest was not against any community but against those laws that were aimed at crushing people. This [LG] law is also aimed at rendering people of Sindh powerless. Those who got votes from rural areas of Sindh never returned to their constituencies and now they wanted to push their voters into problems.
Sindh’s hospitals lack anti-rabies vaccine while “the government of waderas” have done nothing over the last 13 years. This government had paralysed local bodies, she said.
MNA Salahuddin said that Sindh government’s law had divided people by amending the law. A rural-urban divide was created on the basis of fake majority, he added.
He noted that laws in conflict with the Constitution used to be enacted since 2013.
He said that Pakistan’s national security institutions should take notice of Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah’s recent statement [construed as a hint at Sindh’s cessation from the federation] instead of observing silence.
MPA Nadeem Siddiqui said that mayor should be empowered in local bodies law, and argued that this would empower mayor of Larkana as well, besides Karachi’s. He alleged that the CM and provincial ministers were indulging in ethnic politics while the Muttahida was fighting for people’s rights.
Hyderabad women wing in-charge Farzana Saeed said that people like [Sindh Information Minister] Saeed Ghani wanted to raise their stature by criticising the Muttahida. She said her party’s women wing was well aware of their real faces.
Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2021
