KARACHI: Sindh Information and Labour Minister, Saeed Ghani, has said the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) has been attempting to do bloodshed in Karachi just for its own political gains but he is pleased that people of the city are no more lured by this campaign.
Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, the Sindh Information Minister said that an attempt was being made to cause discord in Karachi on ethnic grounds on the pretext provincial local government law and system. He said the local government system was not an easy thing that every person could understand it. “We will not again let them commit terrorism in Karachi as they should keep this thing in mind. We even resisted them during the time when they used to shoot and kill people and stuff their bodies in gunny bags,” said the Sindh Information Minister while talking about MQM.
He said that every political party reserved the right to question the performance of the Pakistan People’s Party in Karachi except MQM. “This is the party, which is responsible for ruining education in the city, make the builders ran away from the city, as terrorism got nurtured in the city as they are nobody to say that we have ruined Karachi,” he said. He said they had been doing their best to foil the attempt being made to cause hatred, disunity, ethnic strife in Karachi and bring back the era of Altaf Hussain on the pretext of newly passed local government amendment bill. He said that they had also been discharging the responsibility of let other political parties knew about this conspiracy.
He said the latest amendment bill passed by the Sindh Assembly was aimed to at improving the Sindh Local Government Act-2013. He said the office of Karachi’s mayor had been empowered to an extent that certain of the new powers had not been given the Sindh Local Government Act of 2001. The Sindh Information Minister said the provincial government for the very first time had empowered Karachi’s mayor to chair the solid waste management agency to be established in the city as no earlier provincial local government law had given powers to the mayor to collect waste from the city.
He said the Sindh government had empowered the elected local government representatives to get a supervisory role in over 10 of its departments including education, health, and policing. To a question, he said the MQM had once again attempted to hijack the city at the gunpoint and stuff votes in the ballot boxes in its favour by any mean. He said that gone were time when a resident of Karachi was informed on reaching the polling station that his vote had been polled and even votes of the dead persons belonging to the city had been polled.
He said that MQM had secured votes through honest means only in the general elections of 1988 and 1990 as afterwards the election process in the city had been marred. “We do understand that they do have a limited vote bank in the city but the same should not be used as the basis to cause violence and bloodshed in Karachi,” he said. Saeed Ghani said the PPP had made a difficult decision to make MQM a part of the coalition government in 2008 just to protect the residents and businesspersons of Karachi from these terrorists.
He admitted that late Benazir Bhutto had gone to the nine-zero in Karachi as the People’s Party at that time had the understanding that MQM had held mandate of urban areas of Sindh. He said the MQM had become upset because it had sensed its utter defeat in the upcoming local government polls to be held in Karachi as the case of cantonment elections and NA-249 by-polls recently held in the city.