SUKKUR: Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan emir Sirajul Haq has accused federal and provincial governments of telling lies on TV channels about rehabilitation of flood-hit people and said that Sindh has received huge amount of international aid but it has not reached genuine victims.

Haq said at a gathering of party workers who had staged a sit-in on Rohri section of the National Highway in protest against government failure to rehabilitate calamity-stricken people, rising inflation and joblessness, that the international funds for the victims might be used as bribe in upcoming election by ministers of federal and provincial governments.

He said the provincial government had not handed out food, tents, blankets, clothes, and other necessary items to internally displaced persons, and completely failed to provide medical help to patients, especially children and women who were hit by waterborne diseases in relief camps and marooned areas.

He said that Pakistan Peoples Party’s ministers and leaders were giving relief goods only to the people who frequented their offices and bungalows, and warned that if they did not give relief items to the genuine victims, people would burn down their offices and guesthouses. PPP had ruled Sindh for 17 years but it had neither developed infrastructure, nor ended poverty, he said.

He said the poor were getting poorer in Sindh and PPP ministers were becoming richer. “Though India is our arch-enemy but in fact these ministers and advisers are our bigger enemies than India,” said Haq.

He said the PPP was a big hurdle to Sindh’s development. It was the ruling party’s bad governance that children of rain-hit people were seen leading a wretched life on roads, he said.

Haq said that if the enemy dropped a bomb on Pakistan, it could hardly destroy an area or kill one or two hundred thousand people but the corrupt leaders had destroyed the entire country and ruined the whole nation.

He said the finance minister claimed to have spent Rs20 billion on flood victims but in reality the government had not used even Rs20,000 on IDPs.

He urged people to take to the streets and drag the corrupt on roads and promised that his party would stand by them if they fought against the ruling elite. The fight between Pakistan Democratic Movement and PTI was a ‘Topi drama’ because both of them were establishment’s pampered children, he said.

“Their fight is not for the rights of people, it is for their vested interests because PDM, PTI and PPP are all American agents,” he said.

Earlier in Shikarpur and Jacob­abad, Haq said while addressing processions that Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari liked to live in London and Washington since he had been made foreign minister. PPP’s senior leaders had confessed that they had wronged people of Sindh, he claimed.

He alleged that the international funds given for calamity-hit people might be used as bribe in upcoming election by federal and provincial ministers. The federal and provincial governments had ruined the country, stagnant rainwater had destroyed standing crops on thousands of acres and millions of acres farmland, he said, adding that the provincial government had promised to drain floodwaters from inundated farmland till Oct 15 but it failed to do so.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2022