KARACHI: The Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) on Friday warned the authorities that if the ‘flawed results’ of intermediate students were not fixed in the next few days, the party would stage a sit-in outside the CM House with the affected youngsters and their parents.

The party, which staged a protest sit-in outside the Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) to protest against the recent results which left majority of the students failed in different subjects, said it had decided to ‘resolve the issue’ while protesting in line with its democratic and constitutional right.

The protest, which was attended by a large number of affected students and their parents, lasted for several hours and suspended the traffic on the key road link of North Nazimabad. It was called off by the party leadership with a warning for the next protest outside the CM House.

“In the next phase, we would expand the protest and wouldn’t allow educational genocide in Karachi,” said JI Karachi chief Hafiz Naeemur Rehman while addressing the sit-in. “I am short of words that what this feudal mindset has done with Karachi over the past 15 years. First, they deprived the youth of the public sector jobs. Now they subject them to sheer injustice when it comes to admissions in professional education institutes.”

He called it a ‘deliberate and organised move’ to keep the results of Karachi results poor, so that its youth gave up studies and could not pursue higher education. He demanded the authorities to conduct a forensic audit of the copies as requested by the students and random audit of the other copies. He referred to some students who secured over 90 per cent of marks in the matriculation exams, but they were declared failed in several subjects of the first year of the intermediate exams.

He also demanded inquiry against top officials of the BIEK and called for ‘ruthless accountability’ of those who were part of that ‘conspiracy’. Announcing a JI committee, he asked the affected students to contact the party members along with their mark sheets for collective efforts.

“It’s the Pakistan People Party which is ruining the education sector in order to plunder the resources and commit corruption. The corrupt officials from other cities are transferred to Karachi and fake appointments are made in their districts,” he said.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2024