HYDERABAD: Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) chairman Syed Mustafa Kamal has said that he wholeheartedly supports Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P)’s demand for a third-party audit of the national census, but at the same time he is surprised as to why that party is raising the demand when it is a part of the federal government itself.

Speaking to reporters before PSP’s Eid Miladun Nabi (PBUH) programme at Holmstead Hall here on Thursday, Mr Kamal said that census was an issue that could be decided with one signature of the prime minister. Therefore, MQM-P’s ministers Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui and Farogh Naseem should approach the PM and get it settled.

He said he had been raising this issue from day one as seven million people of Karachi and Hyderabad had not been counted in the census.

“While Lahore’s population grows by three per cent, Karachi’s remains 1.5 per cent. Everyone knows that there is no influx of people in Lahore from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Kashmir; Burmese or Afghans do not live there. But Karachi gets an unending influx of such people from these areas,” he said.

He said Pakistan Peoples Party leader Asif Ali Zardari had once stated that Karachi’s population was not fewer than 30 million. “Sindh chief minister initially raised the issue but when he learnt that the ... uncounted seven million population actually belongs to Karachi and Hyderabad and not to his rural constituency, he signed the census documents in the Council of Common Interests (CCI).”

He said the Sindh Local Government Ordinance was passed in 2013, when MQM was part of the provincial government and the Sindh governor also belonged to it. Now the MQM-P must explain why it had remained silent when powers of Sindh’s urban areas were usurped by the provincial government.

“The MQM-P should stop lying now because it was enjoying ministries then,” he remarked.

Turning to inflation and price hike in the country, Mr Kamal claimed that all financial institutions were predicting a tougher year ahead as far as economic issues were concerned.

He noted that one million people here were jobless and in future five million would be counted below poverty line.

Expressing his concern over other issues, the PSP chairman pointed out that in Sindh, anti-rabies vaccine was not available while dogs were killing people.

He said heirs of eight victims of the tragic train inferno had been running from pillar to post to get bodies of their dear ones but the Pakistan Railways authorities were asking them to produce evidence. He said Railways Minister Shaikh Rashid, who was an influential member of the federal cabinet, should play his due role in this regard.

The former Karachi mayor also criticised both provincial and local governments for depriving people of their livelihood by demolishing encroachments. The very governments would otherwise claim that they were not being given powers to serve people.

He condemned violence by lawyers in Lahore saying that they caused irreparable loss to this profession.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2019