KARACHI: The sit-in of the Jamaat-i-Islami outside the Sindh Assembly against the recently passed Sindh Local Government (Amendment) Act 2021 entered its second week on Friday as the top leadership of the party expressed the resolve to continue the protest until the announcement of the Pakistan Peoples Party to review the ‘black law’.

The JI leadership also called for countrywide protests and rallies on Sunday (tomorrow) to demand rights for Karachiites.

On the eighth day of the sit-in, JI chief Senator Siraj ul Haq came to join the protesters and address the participants.

He warned the PPP government that it should not remain under the ‘illusion’ that the JI workers would return after getting ‘tired’ from the sit-in.

He called it an irony that a city that generated employment for people of every district and town of the country was never owned by the rulers.

The JI chief called it a great ‘tragedy’ that Karachi that deserved to become the world’s centre was pleading for its due rights from its very own rulers.

He vowed that the JI would further boost the momentum of its protest and soon different cities of the country would hear slogans for Karachi rights.

“The PPP government is playing the same dirty politics when it blames us that we are doing politics of ethnicity,” he said.

“But let me tell my PPP friends that the people can no more be fooled with the same hollow claims and old tactics. Even a child of this country knows that the PPP is the party which represents a feudal mindset in this country.

“It neither represents any ethnicity, nor any community. It represents the feudal only. It represents the landlord and it represents the ideology of suppression. But the people of Karachi are not alone. On Sunday every single Pakistani from Karachi to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir to Gwadar will come out of their home on JI call to show solidarity with Karachiites.”

Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2022