LAHORE: “Our relatives and friends who visit us taunt us that we are living on heaps of filth,” bemoans Miss Nazia, a resident of Chungi Amer Sidhu, a backward locality in the National Assembly’s constituency NA-127, Lahore-XI, that lacks basic amenities since decades.

“It seems as the city’s solid waste managers have forgotten us for good,” she bewails.Mostly inhabited by working class, the area lies between Quaid-i-Azam (Township) and Ferozepur industrial estate.

“The water supply is in extremely poor state. Sewage gets mixed into drinking water thanks to rusty pipelines, sewage oozes out from choking gutters,” she laments.

Abdul Rauf, another resident, says the locality presents the look of a pool of filthy water housing mosquitoes. Movement in streets becomes difficult in rainy season.

He regrets that public representatives elected from the area never look back after securing votes as the people are falling prey to water-borne diseases like hepatitis, typhoid and gastroenteritis, etc.

Considering themselves as children of a lesser god, the residents of the area have lost all hopes of seeing any change in their lives (read neighbourhood) drawing attention of the groups like the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party looking for an opportunity to establish themselves as representatives of the working classes and lower strata of society.

The HKP, a newly-formed conglomerate of elements with Left tendencies, academics, doctors, lawyers, progressive students, social organizations and farmer bodies, is active in the constituency for the last couple of years making efforts to raise awareness among the people about their political rights and how to claim them.

To strengthen its roots among the masses, the party began providing community services in the locality by establishing academies and medical dispensaries, holding medical camps and setting up skills training centres, etc.

HKP President Farooq Tariq says they have set up a number of Khalq academies, dispensaries and a Chirag Ghar, which holds short beautician and IT training courses etc. He claims that 500 children who had quit schools in the wake of Covid pandemic have returned to schools through their efforts, while they have so far managed to provide social security cards to around 60,000 workers of different factories.

The party has fielded two candidates – Muzammal Kakar in NA-127, a progressive student leader who hails from Qila Saifullah in Balochistan, and Prof Ammar Ali Jan in PP-160 – in a bid to provide an alternative to what it says representatives of capitalist parties, PML-N, PTI and PPP. They are facing political giants like Bilawal Bhutto (NA-127), and Malik Asad Khokhar and Mian Misbah-ur-Rehman (PP-160).

Betting on the working class in the constituency, the HKP is touching the core issues of the area like poor sanitation, unsafe drinking water, poor education facilities as no state-run school has been set up in PP-160 in last 40 years though those who won from here developed their own housing societies, lack of graveyard and technical/ professional education services, uninterrupted power and gas supplies.

Fearing that the ‘moneyed’ parties will employ their financial prowess to manipulate the opinion of the voters as usual, Mr Tariq says they are convincing people not to ‘sell out’ their votes for a mere Rs5000 per vote and continue living a miserable life for the next five years like in the past. Whatever the outcome of the elections, he says, their community services will continue.

The HKP has ‘found’ an unlikely candidate in NA-161 (Bahawalnagar) – noted journalist Imtiaz Alam, the younger brother of former federal minister Mumtaz Alam Gilani, who applied for the party symbol (loudspeaker) at the 11th hour.

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2024