BADIN: Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl Sindh secretary general Maulana Rashid Mehmood Soomro has invited estranged Pakistan Peoples Party leader Dr Zulfikar Ali Mirza to either join JUI-F or enter electoral alliance with the party for the upcoming general elections.

He said that his party did not join the anti-PPP Grand Democratic Alliance because most of the alliance leaders did not have any public support.

The maulana was speaking to party workers in Golarchi town and Keetari village near Chhachhro town in Tharparkar late on Tuesday evening.

He said that people would certainly vote for JUI-F to bring positive change in their lives because its leadership was clean and did not face any corruption charges and they would vote out the corrupt and the incompetent. No alliance could defeat PPP in Sindh unless it was supported by JUI-F, he said.

He claimed that he would contest and win election against PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari in Larkana and the party would field candidates in all constituencies of the province as it had emerged as the second largest party in rural Sindh in last local bodies polls.

Asif Ali Zardari was daydreaming about winning elections with the help of feudal lords as people had now got fed up with the massive scale of corruption by PPP men, he said.

He said that the Sindh government had failed to live up to expectations of people. Rulers had not even spared humanitarian crisis in Thar and were exploiting it to swallow up funds. Thar needed sustainable development programmes to bring it at par with other green deserts of the world, he said.

The maulana expressed serious concern over unabated deaths of infants and pregnant women in Thar and held rulers responsible for the tragedy.

It was shameful for the rulers that children of the poor were dying of hunger in Thar while rulers’ kids were playing with dogs at the expense of public, he said.

He said that PPP rulers were only interested in gobbling up public money and were least concerned about genuine issues of the province. He criticised the government for its ‘indifferent’ attitude towards farmers of rice, sugar cane and other crops and said that PPP had completely destroyed the farm sector.

He rejected claims that setting up of seminaries in Thar would disrupt the area’s traditional communal harmony and termed it a malicious campaign by “anti-Islam elements that were thriving on funds of Western countries”.

All anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam forces should be dealt with iron hands, he said.

He said that all conspiracies against religious schools would be foiled. The seminaries run by his party were registered and were busy imparting education to millions of children free of cost across the country, he said.

The maulana urged both Sindh government and mining companies engaged in the extraction of coal in Thar to allay fears of locals.

He lamented that justice in the assassination case of his father Maulana Khalid Mehmood Soomro had not been done and said that he would announce future strategy in Shuhada-i-Islam conference to be held on Nov 26 in Larkana.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2017