MIRPURKHAS: Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui has issued, what he called an “ultimatum” to Sindh government over flawed census of urban population and other injustices being meted out to Muhajirs.

He said at a protest rally at Post Office Chowk here on Sunday that regrettably, the past governments failed to ensure correct counting of urban population and undercounted population even in Karachi, which paid 60 per cent of the total tax collected in the country.

He demanded the government immediately complete voter-lists and carry out delimitations according to genuine number of population.

He said that many attempts were made to turn Muhajirs into third-rate citizens but everyone needed to understand that founders of Pakistan and their progeny could never be reduced to second- or third-grade citizens; “they will always remain the first-grade citizens”.

Seeks accurate census, due share in govt jobs

He said the biased Sindh government had seized rights of urban population, particularly Muhajirs by enforcing an illegal quota system on cities, and deprived Muhajir youth of jobs in public sector and admissions to universities and colleges.

He said that highly prejudiced and biased policies of PPP government had forced them to take to the street. “Today, we are recording our protest to show state agencies and the government that Muhajirs stand by other communities in Mirpurkhas for seeking rights,” he said.

He recalled that in 1970 [veteran Sindhi nationalist leader late] G.M. Syed had issued a pamphlet which demanded separation of Karachi from Sindh province but then representatives of Karachi had rejected his demand.

He said that today’s MQM-P did not want friction and wanted to work with all parties and groups. “No leader in the country is greater than the Quaid-i-Azam and no people could be more patriotic than Muhajirs, who had created this country,” he said.

Siddiqui said that his community had laid down enough sacrifices to mitigate prejudice and hatred among the two major [lingual] communities of Sindh’s population but it’s now the others’ turn to render sacrifice. “If they are not ready to for this, then time and history will compel them to sacrifice,” he said.

He said that when founders of Pakistan took to the street, they created countries and brought down governments. “Our forefathers had come to Pakistan voluntarily to turn it into a model of Islamic country but political leadership after 1970 turned it into something else,” he said.

“We had not come to Pakistan to live under this feudal system. If the establishment wants to save Pakistan then it will have to hand the country back to the generation of the founders of the nation,” he said.

He said that post-1970 rulers drove wedges between different communities and caused dream of Sindhu Desh to develop and grow. People should get united on MQM-P’s platform to get their rights, he said.

Siddiqui warned that if the situation did not change in Sindh then people would finally stage sit-ins before the Chief Minister House and Bilawal House to bring down the government.

The party’s deputy convener Kanwar Naveed Jameel said that Mirpurkhas was a city of Muhajirs and everybody knew what PPP’s attitude was towards the Urdu-speaking community.

He accused PPP of having closed the door of jobs and livelihoods on Muhajirs and said the Sindh government had deprived them of their rights through the unjust quota system. The government had tempered with delimitations in Mirpurkhas under a conspiracy to deprive Muhajirs of their right to elect their representative, he said.

He lamented that no government agency or department nor political parties, federal government or the judiciary were ready to come forward and end injustices in Sindh by restoring rights to Muhajirs.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2022