KARACHI: After raising the temperature over local government elections in Karachi and Hyderabad on the issue of “unjust delimitation” amid election boycott and threats of street protests against ‘injustice with urban Sindh’, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) on Wednesday decided to put its plan of street protests on hold and give another chance to the Sindh government and the Election Commission of Pakistan to fix the flaws.

The party leadership shared the fresh strategy at a press conference suggesting little chances of immediate protest as it had announced earlier and relying again on the provincial administration and the ECP for addressing its grievances before it launches any protest drive.

The MQM-P had time and again blamed the PPP and the ECP for holding “unjust and illegal elections”.

Speaking at a press conference, party convener Khalid Maqbool Siddiqi said: “We are developing an opinion for our narrative after which we would use our democratic right of a protest. But before this we want to give another chance to the Sindh government and the Election Commission so they can fix the flaws on their part.”

Khalid Maqbool terms Jan 15 poll an attempt to steal mandate of ‘true representatives of urban Sindh’

He said that after the Sindh government decision to withdraw notification on delimitation, “the ECP should have started the process of fresh delimitation, but we haven’t seen anything on the ground”.

Claiming it a ‘success’ of their narrative, he called the local government elections in Karachi and Hyderabad a ‘failure’ to win the people’s mandate after the party announced a boycott for the electoral process in protest against unjustified delimitation, fake voters’ list and less count of population in the National Census 2017.

Accompanied by party leaders Dr Farooq Sattar and Syed Mustafa Kamal, the MQM-P convener reiterated the party’s reservations over the role of the ECP which they said went “beyond its constitutional mandate” to allow the local government elections despite the Sindh government decision to withdraw the notification on delimitation.

“The Jan 15 election is an attempt to steal the mandate of true representatives of urban Sindh,” he said. “We reject these elections and appeal the judiciary to play their role to protect the true mandate of the people of Karachi and Hyderabad.”

With this low turnout, he said, the local government elections in Karachi and Hyderabad had already lost their moral value and the party concerns would further prove to be true in the days to come.

“Even those parties who contested the polls would accept one day that the MQM was right,” he said.

“Those contested the polls despite knowing the exploitation, injustice and illegal process of all this exercise would be rejected by the people of Karachi. They in fact have sold out their political future. The people of Karachi would never accept them as their local government representatives,” he said.

He claimed that the ‘gerrymandering’ was done to deprive Karachi of more than 70 union committees and the fresh result of voting on the current delimitation didn’t reflect the true mandate of the metropolis.

“How can you do justice with the people of this city by this local government system when you did not even count them correctly? In this situation, the people of Karachi would be at the losing side,” he added.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2023